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Does incrementing depending module version should increment parent module version?

I have parent module A that has module B as its dependency. If I increment version of B for just a simple bug fix, that does not change any API or break anything, do I still need to increment version of A?

Example:

A:1.10.0 --> B:2.5.0
fixing B to 2.5.1

In this case, A on Maven depends on older version of B, therefore, it seems it make sense to increate the version of A, too; so to have:

A:1.10.1 --> B:2.5.1

even though we didnt change anything in A.

Is this correct?

Solution

  • Yes, you are correct. If you change version of any of the dependency, you will need to build and release parent project again. This will create the new released version of your parent module A.

    (Here, I am assuming that parent module A packaging type is other than pom. If the packaging type is pom, then its a different story altogether.)

    Edited:

    When you say parent project, you will declare its packaging as pom. It will have it's own version.

    <project>
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>com.mycompany.app</groupId>
  <artifactId>parent</artifactId>
  <version>0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <packaging>pom</packaging>

  <modules>
    <module>web-project</module>
  </modules>
</project>

    You can also refer to some modules (child projects) in your parent pom declaration. 

    <parent>
    <groupId>com.mycompany.app</groupId>
    <artifactId>parent</artifactId>
    <version>0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>     
</parent>

<artifactId>web-project</artifactId>
<packaging>war</packaging>

    Then for submodules there is no need to declare any version for it. Parent version will be carried over to the child project. You can override version in the child project but that's not a common practice. So your parent pom version will be incremented automatically when you release it with maven. And this new version will be carried over to child projects (modules) also.

    See this - Maven project version inheritance - do I have to specify the parent version?

    So parent module A, I was referring to the above case.

    And maven repo - can be of two types - local repository and remote repository. Local repo is where maven looks for resolviing dependencies. This is on your machine. If maven doesn't find it there, maven retrieve those depedencies from remote repository.