Maven and the Dangers of Snapshots

Recently we've been causing problems in the regular builds of branches of our software.

Basically the problem is our own fault and is related to Maven Snapshots.

According to the guide¹, a Snapshot is a library that is still under development, and may change rapidly as new versions of the Snapshot are pushed to the Nexus regularly.

If a dependency on a Snapshot is defined in your pom.xml, then Maven, as it should, always picks the latest Snapshot.

This is fine and dandy if you are currently developing your software, and you want the newest of the new of the libraries that your other software teams are developing.

The Problem

It means that once you create a stable release of your software (and the appropriate Git branch for it to live in as well, of course) it is important to replace the Snapshot in the pom.xml with the appropriate released version.

We neglected to do just that.

The Consequence

Our branch containing the release version of our software suddenly bombed with compile errors in the Deployment Pipeline.

This caused the maintenance people a headache, as the Git revision of the branch had not changed, between the previous build (which compiled just fine) and the new build (which bombed).

Despite the build being pulled from Git with the exact same revision, it was technically different from the previous build.

All because we kept developing the Snapshot and pushing it into the Nexus.

What we should have done

• create a proper release of the library
• change the pom.xml in the branch to refer to this release.
• create a new snapshot of the library
• use the new snapshot in the pom.xml of the master branch (which is used for development)

Now the build of both the branch as well as the master should compile again.

References

[1] Apache Maven - Getting Started

https://maven.apache.org/guides/getting-started/

Continuous Releasing of Maven Artifacts

https://dzone.com/articles/continuous-releasing-maven

Update: reference added.