[wildfly-dev] Automate keeping Wildfly dependencies up-to-date?

[Tomas Hofman]

Hello,

would the Wildfly team be interested in (or opposed to) receiving component 
upgrade PRs, which would be created automatically when a new component version 
is released? (I'm talking about new micro/SP versions, depending on the 
component, i.e. version that could be reasonably expected to be suitable for 
consumption, without issues like breaking API changes etc.)

I'm working on a tool [1], which is able to provide these PRs.

The tool scans given project for dependencies, and then looks at what versions 
of those dependencies are available in Maven Central and possibly other 
repositories. I can configure rules for each dependency, that specify what 
versions should be considered viable for upgrading (e.g. for "org.picketlink:*" 
we would only offer new "SP" builds in the same micro, for most of the other 
dependencies we would only offer new micros, and some artifacts would perhaps 
be blacklisted). Example of this configuration is here [2].

Advantages that I believe could be gained from this:

* It would bring us an advantage of having new component micros tested soon in 
Wildfly, and therefore having more confidence when we need to do the same 
upgrades in EAP.

* It would also help in preventing EAP running ahead of Wildfly in component 
versions, which happens occasionally. EAP release coordinator usually spots 
this problem and creates missing PR in Wildfly, but it's a manual check and 
therefore a small risk remains.

* It would ensure Wildfly is consuming latest component fixes.

You can review PRs generated last week in my fork of Wildfly [3].

It's a work in progress, I expect the tool and it's configuration would evolve 
according to experiences we would get from using it...

What do you think?

[1] https://github.com/TomasHofman/maven-dependency-updater/
[2] 
https://github.com/jboss-set/dependency-alignment-configs/blob/master/wildfly-18-minimal.json#L44
[3] https://github.com/TomasHofman/wildfly/pulls

-- 
Tomas Hofman
Software Engineer, JBoss SET
Red Hat