Greetings M2E Committers,
I'd like to make you aware that M2E has a significant user base outside of the committer bubble. Quite a a significant amount of these users are enterprise customers, which do expect some kind of stability, compatibility and announcements around upcoming breakages.
Lately, an issue that I ran into myself within the organization I work with is this:
The M2E `/latest` update site got broken because it suddenly depends non *none official*, *none released* artifacts of other Eclipse projects. This is not only problematic from a customer/user point of view, it's also problematic from an Eclipse Development Process and IP process point of view. As a member of the Technology PMC, the latter is more concerning for me.
It's a good practice for mature, stable Eclipse projects, with a significant user base, to create and publish a version/release/backwards compatibility. As an example, the Eclipse Git integration generally tries to support the last N-2 Eclipse versions with their releases. I do consider M2E as important as EGit and thus, my recommendation is to implement something similar for M2E.
I think that at a very minimum, the `/latest` update site should point to a release, which does not depend on unreleased artifacts.
Appreciate your support and respect of the EDP and best practices.
.Gunnar
