[fedora-java] maven and versioned dependencies

[Stanislav Ochotnicky]

Excerpts from Andrew Overholt's message of Mon Aug 16 15:33:26 +0200 2010:
> * Orion Poplawski <orion at cora.nwra.com> [2010-08-13 16:49]:
> > On 08/13/2010 05:50 AM, Andrew Overholt wrote:
> > >>I would have thought that maven would complain when provided versions were not
> > >>compatible with requested versions.
> > >
> > >I'm pretty sure Deepak told me that our maven patches to do the mvn-jpp,
> > >look in /usr/share/java, etc. make it ignore versions (if you're using
> > >mvn-jpp and not just regular mvn).
> > >
> > >Andrew
> > 
> > Intentional?  Unavoidable?  Bug?
> 
> Intentional AFAIK.  Deepak will be able to speak more authoritatively
> later in the week when he's around.

I am no Deepak but in the meantime maybe I can shed some light on this
(or at least write what I got to know about maven over the course of
last few months).

This is indeed intentional and reason is simple. Normally we have only
one version of each package installed. So there will probably never be
ant-1.7 and ant-1.8 installed simultaneously unless we decide it's
necessary to create package ant18 (or something similar).

Therefore version checks are ignored when resolving maven dependencies
in jpp mode. Otherwise we would get tons of dependency issues
when compiling packages with maven. Most of the time this doesn't
cause compilation/runtime problems and if it does we update/backport
dependencies so that all Fedora packages are able to use same versions
of dependencies. This can sometimes be time-consuming (we have to
update packages to use new dependencies) but then we usually offer
these updates upstream and we don't have to do it again.

Deepak can probably get more technical or correct my assumtions, but
this is my understanding of this situation so far.

-- 
Stanislav Ochotnicky <sochotnicky at redhat.com>
Associate Software Engineer - Base Operating Systems Brno

PGP: 71A1677C
Red Hat Inc.                               http://cz.redhat.com
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