Should Maven dependency version ranges be considered deprecated?

Question

Given that it\'s very hard to find anything about dependency version ranges in the official documentation (the best I could come up with is http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVE

Answer 1

I don't know why you think that version ranges are not documented. There is a concrete abstract in the Maven Complete Reference documentation.

Nevertheless - a huge problem (in my opinion) is that it is documented that "Resolution of dependency ranges should not resolve to a snapshot (development version) unless it is included as an explicit boundary." (the link you provided) but the system behaves different. If you use version ranges you will get SNAPSHOT versions if they exists in your range (MNG-3092). The discussion if this is wanted or not has not ended yet.

Currently - if you use version ranges - you might get SNAPSHOT dependencies. So you really have to be careful and decide if this is wanted. It might be useful for your own developed depedencies but I doubt that you should use it for 3rd party libraries.