Release Notes – Maven 3.5.0-beta-1

The Apache Maven team would like to announce the release of Maven 3.5.0-beta-1.

NOTE:

This is an BETA release. There is the potential that features may be removed between this release and the first GA release in the 3.5.x release line.

Please consult the Known Issues section below before use

Maven 3.5.0-beta-1 is available for download.

Maven is a software project management and comprehension tool. Based on the concept of a project object model (POM), Maven can manage a project's build, reporting and documentation from a central place.

The core release is independent of the plugins available. Further releases of plugins will be made separately. See the PluginList for more information.

We hope you enjoy using Maven! If you have any questions, please consult:

Known Issues

The following issues were identified during release testing of this BETA release but have not been deemed as release blockers:

  • MNG-6190 maven-resolver-provider's DefaultArtifactDescriptorReader has mismatched constructor and initService methods (this issue does not affect normal usage of Maven)
  • MNG-6191 mvn -f complains about illegal readlink option under macOS
  • MNG-6192 The distribution zip file has unordered entries and some tools - most notably Maven wrapper - will fail to unzip the distribution

Why not Maven 3.4.0?

After Maven 3.3.9 was released, the Eclipse Aether project was retired and the code base was migrated to the Apache Maven project.

The original goal for the 3.4.0 release was to replace Aether with the exact same code after migration to the Apache Maven project and then proceed with bug fixes to the resolver code as well as other areas of Maven.

The migration of the code between the two foundations took longer than expected and as a result there were other changes committed to Maven core that were outside the scope of intent for 3.4.0.

In order to refocus on the original intent for 3.4.0, the decision was taken to revert the Maven core history to the point of the 3.3.9 release and merge in the desired changes one at a time.

Because there had been a lot of communication about different features being delivered and bugs fixed in Maven 3.4.0 and the new history may not contain them in the first release, the decision was taken to forever burn the 3.4.x release line.

More detail on this decision can be read in the mailing list archive.

Reporters and Contributors of this release

Bugs:

  • MNG-6090 reporter: Harald Wellmann
  • MNG-6173 reporter/contributor: Christoph Böhme

Many thanks to all reporters and contributors for their time and support.

Preliminary Testers

Thank you also for your time and feedback.

Overview about the changes

  • The most obvious change you may encounter is that the console output has colors now MNG-3507, MNG-6093.

  • The new project.directory special property adds support in every calculated URLs (project, SCM, site) for module directory name that does not match artifactId MNG-5878

  • The JAVA_HOME discovery has been reduced to simply check if JAVA_HOME is set or not then trying to discover via which java, nothing more MNG-6003.

  • The build bootstrapping support via Apache Ant has been removed. You can now only bootstrap Maven build with a previous version of Maven, but not with Ant any more MNG-5904.

  • Based on problems in using M2_HOME related to different Maven versions installed and to simplify things, the usage of M2_HOME has been removed and is not supported any more MNG-5823, MNG-5836, MNG-5607.

  • Important change for windows users: The usage of %HOME% has been replaced with %USERPROFILE% MNG-6001

  • Several issues have been reported and fixed related to the mvn script either for Unix/Linux/Cygwin/Solaris or for Windows MNG-5815, MNG-5852, MNG-5963, MNG-6022.

  • In Maven 3.3.9, we have removed bindings for maven-ejb3-plugin because it does not exist. We follow-up and removed the artifact handler for ejb3 and the par lifecycle MNG-6014, MNG-6017.

  • In previous Maven versions, there had been a larger problem related to memory usage in case of very large reactors (200-300 modules or more) which caused failures with out of memory exceptions or the need to increase the memory settings. This problem has been fixed with MNG-6030.

  • If you have defined a property within the .mvn/maven.config file, it was not possible to overwrite the property via command line. This has been fixed with MNG-6078.

  • If you have are using <prerequisites>..</prerequisites> for a non maven-plugin project, you will get a WARNING which looks like this:

[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[WARNING] The project org.apache.maven:maven:pom:3.5.0-SNAPSHOT uses prerequisites which is only intended for maven-plugin projects but not for non maven-plugin projects. For such purposes you should use the maven-enforcer-plugin. See https://maven.apache.org/enforcer/enforcer-rules/requireMavenVersion.html

This will tell you to use maven-enforcer-plugin to check the version of Maven you are expecting to build your project with, instead of using prerequisites MNG-5297, MNG-6092.

Improvements:

Bugs:

  • MNG-5895 - Problem with CI friendly usage of ${..} which is already defined via property in pom file.
  • MNG-6057 - Problem with CI friendly usage of ${..} reactor order is changed
  • MNG-6090 - CI friendly properties break submodule builds
  • MNG-6170 - NPE in cases using Multithreaded -T X versions:set -DnewVersion=1.0-SNAPSHOT
  • MNG-6173 - MavenSession.getAllProjects() should return all projects in the reactor
  • MNG-6176 - Javadoc errors prevent release with Java 8
  • MNG-6177 - The --file command line option of the Windows and Unix launchers does not work for directory names like “Spaces & Special Char”
  • MNG-6180 - groupId has plain color when goal fails
  • MNG-6181 - HttpClient produces a lot of noise at debug loglevel
  • MNG-6183 - Dependency management debug message corrections.

Improvements:

  • MNG-6078 - Can't overwrite properties which have been defined in .mvn/maven.config
  • MNG-6115 - Add Jansi native library search path to our start scripts to avoid extraction to temp file on each run
  • MNG-6179 - Remove unused prerequisites
  • MNG-6189 - WARN if maven-site-plugin configuration contains reportPlugins element

New Feature:

  • MNG-6182 - ModelResolver interface enhancement: addition of resolveModel( Dependency ) supporting version ranges

The full list of changes can be found in our issue management system.

Complete Release Notes

See complete release notes for all versions