[Hawkular-dev] Timestamped SNAPSHOTs hard to use

[Peter Palaga]

Hi *,

I tried to use $subj for the first time today, and I must say $subj did 
not meet my expectations. Namely, the timestamps and buildNumbers are 
generated at the instant of deployment of the given artifact, which may 
lead to distinct timestampts of artifacts of the same group and same 
deploy operation.

So, when I want to use the latest timestamped SNAPSHOT of Alerts in 
Hawkular, there is no single timestamped version that I could use for 
all Alerts artifacts that I manage using the property 
${version.org.hawkular.alerts}. To use the latest timestamped version, I 
actually can remove the <version.org.hawkular.alerts> property 
altogether. I have to put the latest 0.4.0-SNAPSHOT literal to into all 
managed alerts artifacts 
(https://github.com/hawkular/hawkular/blob/master/pom.xml#L154 and 
https://github.com/hawkular/hawkular/blob/master/pom.xml#L161) then run

   mvn versions:lock-snapshots -Psnapshots

and voila, it resolves the versions as follows:

       <dependency>
         <groupId>org.hawkular.alerts</groupId>
         <artifactId>hawkular-alerts-actions-email</artifactId>
         <version>0.4.0-20150817.111158-17</version>
         <type>war</type>
       </dependency>

       <dependency>
         <groupId>org.hawkular.alerts</groupId>
         <artifactId>hawkular-alerts-rest</artifactId>
         <version>0.4.0-20150817.111150-18</version>
         <type>war</type>
       </dependency>

Here, you can clearly see that the timestamped versions are not the same.

This guarantees the reproducibility of the builds, but I would not call 
it practical. Manual maintenance of these scattered version numbers will 
be error prone and cumbersome. One can use mvn versions plugin to handle 
the versions. 
http://www.mojohaus.org/versions-maven-plugin/examples/advancing-dependency-versions.html

Can anybody see a way how to make the timestamped snapshots easier to use?

Thanks,

Peter