The proposed Common Artifact Repository Enforcement policy raises questions about how CARE hotfixes should be published and discovered. What should the policy consider?
What should the proposed CARE policy consider for Maven Central?
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Sableton.4
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Classifiers seem worth considering. A hotfix could keep the original version and use a classifier to distinguish the patched artifact. If the artifact already has a classifier, the policy would need a convention for combining them.
The catch is discovery. A classifier does not make the version appear newer, so dependency update tools may not offer the fix without changes to how they look for updates.
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I'd want version ordering tested before settling on a suffix like 1.2.3.1-care. Versions with existing qualifiers, such as Final, could behave differently from simple numeric versions. Appending another number may also overlap with versioning conventions maintainers already use.
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Could relocation metadata be an option for directing consumers to a new artifact coordinate? It might also be useful for ordinary project moves or renames. The tricky part is whether it could be added after publication and whether tools would present the destination as an update, so that needs investigation rather than an assumption.
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n74~parcel_219:
That makes the tool support question pretty central. A tidy artifact distinction won't help much if consumers never see the hotfix.