Software Update Announcements

Because everything has a million dependencies (and transitive dependencies) these days, we have a general need to keep the java-parent-project's dependencies up to date. We are by policy extremely conservative on the maintenance branches used for patches, normally only making revisions when we have to, e.g., because of observed bugs or security issues.

On the development branch, though, we normally try to stay a little closer to "current" on our dependencies. This means doing a sweep of all of them (using mvn versions:display-dependency-updates and mvn versions:display-plugin-updates) just before a new minor or major release (x.0.0 or x.y.0). It's also wise to update to new versions of significant managed dependencies when we become aware of them, so that we find any incompatibilities earlier and they are given longer to "cook" before the next significant release.

I've been doing this for a while, using a number of techniques:

There are probably a number of other routes by which I get notifications, but I no longer remember them. I will add to this list when I get notifications that aren't covered by the above.