Maven Release Yearly Policy

This versioning policy for use with Maven's maven-release-plugin specifies a versioning scheme along the lines of that currently used by IntelliJ, namely year.major.minor.

Whilst not recommended for libraries where major version changes typically communicate breaking API changes, this versioning strategy is more useful for deploying consumer-facing software which does not expose APIs.

Usage

This plugin requires Java 8 along with a recent version of the release plugin. To use in your project edit your POM and set the projectVersionPolicyId configuration property of the maven-release-plugin to yearly, along with adding a dependency to this artifact, like so:

<plugin>
  <artifactId>maven-release-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>2.5.3</version>
  <configuration>
    <projectVersionPolicyId>yearly</projectVersionPolicyId>
  </configuration>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>com.ncredinburgh</groupId>
      <artifactId>maven-release-yearly-policy</artifactId>
      <version>1.0</version>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
</plugin>

Semantics

Whenever the current year is detected as being the major version of the artifact, the minor version is incremented as one would expect, so 2017.2 becomes 2017.3 and 2017.2.1 becomes 2017.2.2. Where the major component is not the current year then the version is set to the first release of the current year, so in 2018, version 2017.3.2 becomes 2018.1, even if the present SNAPSHOT version is for a 2017 version. For more details on specifc scenarios see the test cases.