Page History

On this page I am trying to capture different designs, problems and solutions around Version Range processing in Mercury project. Please also read the dev@ list discussion on the subject: http://www.mail-archive.com/search?q=mercury+version+range&l=dev%40maven.apache.org^{Image Removed}

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Design

Mercury uses a standard OSGi definition of a version range, defined in OSGi core specs 4.1,
page 39 in April-2007 PDF available on OSGi site - http://osgi.org^{Image Removed}.

The gist of it is:

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• \[1.2.3, 4.5.6) 1.2.3 <= x < 4.5.6unmigrated-wiki-markup
• \[1.2.3, 4.5.6\] 1.2.3 <= x <= 4.5.6
• (1.2.3, 4.5.6) 1.2.3 < x < 4.5.6
• (1.2.3, 4.5.6] 1.2.3 < x <= 4.5.6
• 1.2.3 1.2.3 <= x

Dependency Builder flow

Dependency Builder component of Mercury is responsible for

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1.2, 1.3-SNAPSHOT, 1.3-alpha-1, 1.3-alpha-2, 1.3-beta-1, 1.3

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Question to answer: what constitutes the *range \ [1.2,1.3)* and how flexible this implementation should be?
Various options:

1. 1.2, 1.3-SNAPSHOT, 1.3-alpha-1, 1.3-alpha-2, 1.3-beta-1
2. 1.2, 1.3-alpha-1, 1.3-alpha-2, 1.3-beta-1
3. 1.2

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Welcome to the debate I say that a version range should only
resolve to a snapshot if it is included as an explicit boundary. See http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-3092^{Image Removed}

You may also be interested in the other issues on my hit list for
being able to use version ranges in Maven: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-2994^{Image Removed}http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MRELEASE-262^{Image Removed}http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MRELEASE-318^{Image Removed}

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Alternative options

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To be well rounded we should consider other approaches to dependencies

its worth having a look at how gentoo does versioning with ranges and slots... http://www.gentoo.org/^{Image Removed}http://devmanual.gentoo.org/general-concepts/dependencies/index.html^{Image Removed}http://devmanual.gentoo.org/general-concepts/slotting/index.html^{Image Removed}

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Use Cases

Stephen Connolly wrote:

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