documentation: it is not obvious what is the difference between release and version

[ineffective]

I'm using versions plugin to update versions of libraries in my project. I have single master pom.xml with 17 sub-modules. I asked on stack-overflow how to speed up artifact resolution. Granted, question sounds aggressive - I'm sorry, it was written in a heat of the moment, because it takes around 40 minutes to check all dependencies. I run two commands (copied from the question):

mvn -B -U versions:use-releases -DexcludeReactor=false -DgenerateBackupPoms=false -DallowSnapshots=false -Dexcludes='org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-parent:*,log4j:log4j:*,commons-io:commons-io:*,commons-beanutils:commons-beanutils:*'
mvn -B -U versions:use-latest-releases -DexcludeReactor=false -DgenerateBackupPoms=false -DallowSnapshots=false -Dexcludes='org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-parent:*,log4j:log4j:*,commons-io:commons-io:*,commons-beanutils:commons-beanutils:*'

It was suggested (by @khmarbaise) that I should use use-latest-versions rather than use-latest-releases.

The problem: I have no idea and were unable to find on maven's documentation page what is the difference between the two, except that one uses latest versions and the other uses latest release. But what is the difference between release and version? Considering that I use allowSnapshots=false there should be (probably) no real difference between the two - and yet there apparently is.

My suggestion is that it should be documented somewhere on plugin's page what these two mean.

[andrzejj0]

UseLatestVersions is an almost exact copy of UseLatestReleases code-wise (which will be handled in a separate issue).

There's one difference. UseLatestReleases will only process dependencies not matching the pattern:

^(.+)-((SNAPSHOT)|(\d{8}\.\d{6}-\d+))$

so, snapshots or versions denoted with a yyyy-MM-dd suffix.

In other words, UseLatestReleases is UseLatestVersions which ignores snapshot or date-tagged dependencies.

I'll add that to the documentation.

[andrzejj0]

To be done together with #807

[ineffective]

So in simple words "version" is "anything" and release is "not-a-snapshot"? Thanks, that makes it MUCH clearer.