[jakarta.ee-community] version numbers and release qualifiers

[Bill Shannon <bill.shannon@xxxxxxxxxx>]

As most of you know, our rules for use of version numbers is published here:
https://wiki.eclipse.org/JakartaEE_Maven_Versioning_Rules

I wanted to highlight recent decisions and validate one of them with this group.


After a discussion in the platform project team, I've updated the rules to
reflect a decision we made:

All Maven programming artifacts (read: jar files containing class files)
are versioned with a three component version number <major>.<minor>.<micro>.
In particular, API jar files use this three component version number, not
the two component number used by specifications.

While, in usual fashion, this is only a recommendation for project teams,
we consider this to be a very *strong* recommendation.


Another issue we decided, but that I haven't updated the document to reflect,
is that version qualifiers should always be upper case.  Version qualifiers
follow the version number with a dash.  For example, in the version
1.2.3-SNAPSHOT, "SNAPSHOT" is the qualifier.

The other common qualifiers in use are:

M	- milestone
RC	- release candidate
B	- build, or sometimes beta

These qualifiers are followed by a number, allowing for multiple, ordered,
milestones or release candidates or builds/betas.  This results in versions
such as: 1.2.3-M1, 4.5.6-RC2, 7.8.9-B37, etc.

The Maven rules for ordering of versions are here:
https://maven.apache.org/pom.html#Version_Order_Specification

You'll notice that the Maven rules use lower case for the qualifiers
even though Maven ignores case when comparing qualifiers, and SNAPSHOT is
effectively always used in upper case.


While there was a strong consensus in the platform project team that version
qualifiers should always be lower case, I wanted to check with the larger
community to make sure we're not going against some wider community or Maven
or other convention with the use of upper case.

If you have any concern about the use of upper case, and especially if you can
point to evidence of lower case being a stronger convention, please let me know.

Silence means you agree upper case is best and thus there's no need to reply.

Thanks.