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• Currently, the <major>.<minor>.<revision> component of a
  version must be numeric; if non-numeric characters are used to
  annotate this (e.g. 3.1.0myvendor-01), the whole string is viewed
  as a qualifier.

• Wiki Markup{{<qualifier>}} and {{<build>}} are exclusive. Hence one can't
  specify {{\[3.1.0-myvendor-01\]}}.

• <qualifier>'s main purpose is for pre-releases (i.e. alpha,
  beta, rc). From a release timeline, the qualifier is lexographically
  compared, with no qualifier having the greatest value. So 3.1.0-
  alpha < 3.1.0-beta < 3.1.0-rc < 3.1.0-sp1 < 3.1.0. The desired
  behavior would be that 3.1.0-sp1 > 3.1.0

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1. Alter groupId or artifactId to include the vendor's tag. An
   artifactId of commons-logging becomes commons-logging-myvendor. This
   has the effect of bubbling the version dependency up.
2. Restrict the Maven remote repository only to those which contain
   artifacts built by a vendor. With this scheme no metadata about the
   vendor is possible in the local repository. It's a very tenuous
   dependency at best
3. Wiki MarkupExactly specify the vendor tag and release (e.g. {{\[3.1.0-myvendor-
   sp1\])}}. Effectively this treats the whole string as a qualifier
   and does work for that specific library, but one loses all ordering
   relationships. You can't specify {{\[3.1.0-myvendor-sp1,3.1.1)}} with this with
   this scheme.

For handling post release versions an alternative would be

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<major>.<minor>.<revision>[:vendortag]([-<qualifier>]|[- 
<build>])

Wiki MarkupThis tag if present in a version dependency would be the most binding.
A specification of {{\[3.1.0:myvendor-SNAPSHOT\]}} would require that
the snapshot used must have that 'myvendor' identifier.

Wiki MarkupIn conjunction with this vendor qualifier tag, it may be acceptable
to use the {{\[-<build>\]}} to distinguish follow-on patch releases,
essentially correlating 'service packs' to a specific build number.
With the presence of a vendor qualifier, this allows the vendor to
define what each build number represents.

Putting this altogether, we can specify the version dependencies for
the examples as follows:

Wiki Markup(exactly 3.1) = {{\[3.1\]}}
(3.1 built by us) = {{\[3.1:us\]}}
(3.1 built by us and sp2) = {{\[3.1:us-02\]}} (assuming sp2
correlates to build 2)
(3.1 built by us and at least sp2) = {{\[3.1:us-02,3.1.1:us)}}