[Question]: Why Maven 3.8.2?

[cstamas]

Brief description

This is more a question. Why this:

protobuf-maven-plugin/protobuf-maven-plugin/pom.xml

Line 34 in aeff23c

<maven>3.8.2</maven>

I mean, we usually say "Maven 3.8", "Maven 3.9" etc (and mean latest patch, so 3.8.8, 3.9.9, etc). Is there some special reason to insist on 3.8.2? There are only bugfixes (some notable) between 3.8.2 and 3.8.8.

[ascopes]

Hmm, there was a reason a long time ago that I updated this. I am trying to recall what it was off the top of my head though, so I am open to rolling back to 3.8.0 and giving it a shot again.

[cstamas]

Why rolling back to 3.8.0? Again, 3.8.8 vs 3.8.2 or even 3.8.0 is just more and more-much-more bugs that were fixed in last patch of 3.8.x line that is 3.8.8. Feel freely to close this, I was just curious is there some special reason to stick to 3.8.2.

[ascopes]

Ah I follow now. At the time I kept it to 3.8.0 as a baseline to provide a guarantee it worked on "3.8.x", without leaving out consumers who are stuck on a less up-to-date version of Maven than the most recent patch on a micro-version. Since then, there has not been a reason to increase the version (I run builds against the prereq version to verify tests pass and what have we).

Is the general advice to target the latest version only or to specify 3.8 instead of 3.8.2 as the constraint?

[ascopes]

Ah, I think I remember the reason now for 3.8.2 over the base at least.

3.8.0 is missing a release binary on the Apache Maven FTP server, and I encountered some issues at the time on 3.8.1 with maven-invoker-plugin which were fixed in 3.8.2 (and are likely no longer an issue) so 3.8.2 was marked as the minimum version.

[cstamas]

Question answered, closing this

[ascopes]

@cstamas just looking at this again... is the implication here that I can just say <maven>3.8</maven> rather than <maven>3.8.2</maven>?