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

Version ranges are the only reason that Maven is still useful. Even considering not using them is bad practice as it leads you into the disaster of multi-module builds, non-functional parent poms, builds that take 10 minutes or longer, badly structured projects like Spring, Hibernate and Wicket as we cover on our Illegal Argument podcast.

To answer your question, they are not deprecated and are actively used in many projects successfully (except when Sonatype allows corrupt metadata into Apache Maven Central).

If you want a really good example of a non-multi-module build (reactor.xml's only) where version ranges are used extensively, go look at Sticky code (http://code.google.com/p/stickycode/)

Answer 2

They are not deprecated in the formal sense that they will be removed in a future version. However, their limitations (and the subsequent lack of wide adoption), mean that they are not as useful as originally intended, and also that they are unlikely to get improvements without a significant re-think.

This is why the documentation is only in the form of the design doc - they exist, but important use cases were never finished to the point where I'd recommend generally using them.

If you have a use case that works currently, and can accommodate the limitations, you can expect them to continue to work for the forseeable future, but there is little beyond that in the works.

Answer 3

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.