Currently there is no visible version schema for interoperability between the different hibernate subprojects. Not only the different hibernate jars need compatibility - dependencies on thirdparty libraries increase complexity even more. Would it be possible to use a common version number for all hibernate subprojects that can work together? Something like:

hibernate-orm 6.1.x
hibernate-search 6.1.x
hibernate-validator 6.1.x
hibernate-ogm 6.1.x
..

<hibernateprojectname major.minor.patchnumber>

are all compatible no matter what the patchnumber is.

To do it this way two things are needed:

1) generate releases in all subprojects (not only the changed one) even if no code changes are there in a subproject as soon as one of the subproject implements incompatible changes (changes that cause compatibility issues with other subprojects)
2) Increment the minor number on incompatible changes in all subprojects
3) Of course this would be a no brainer if all subprojects would be build with a common subsystem like a multimodule maven project.

I understand that from a hibernate developer point of view finding a compatible version collection for the different subproject is an easy thing. For a "user" of these libraries it is sometimes not so easy..