Tycho CI Friendly Versions

Starting with Maven 3.8.5 Tycho now supports an enhanced form of the Maven CI Friendly Versions beside the standard properties names one could also use:

• releaseVersion
• major
• minor
• micro
• qualifier

These uses the usual semantics that you can use them in a version string e.g. <version>${releaseVersion}${qualifier}</version> and pass them on the commandline.

Beside this, Tycho supports some useful default calculation for qualifier if you give a format on the commandline with -Dtycho.buildqualifier.format=yyyyMMddHHmm (or any other format supported). Tycho will also make the build qualifier available in your Maven model!

Alternatively, if you want that your qualifier matches the one from maven you can specify -DforceContextQualifier=abc

That way you can configure your pom in the following way:

<project>
	<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
	<groupId>...</groupId>
	<artifactId>...</artifactId>
	<packaging>pom</packaging>
	<version>${releaseVersion}${qualifier}</version>
  <properties>
    <!-- Defines the default Qualifier if no format is given-->
    <releaseVersion>1.0.0</releaseVersion>
    <qualifier>-SNAPSHOT</qualifier>
    ...
  </properties>
  ...
</project>

What will result in the usual 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT for a regular mvn clean install, if you want to do a release, you can now simply call mvn -Dtycho.buildqualifier.format=yyyyMMddHHmm clean deploy and your artifact will get the 1.0.0-<formatted qualifier> version when published! This also is supported if you use pomless build.

To use this new feature you need to enable the tycho-build extension with the .mvn/extensions.xml file in the root of your project directory:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<extensions>
	<extension>
		<groupId>org.eclipse.tycho</groupId>
		<artifactId>tycho-build</artifactId>
		<version>${tycho-version}</version>
	</extension>
	<!-- possibly other extensions here -->
</extensions>

Please note that we use another new feature from Maven 3.8.5 here, where you can use properties from the file .mvn/maven.config in your .mvn/extensions.xml file, so if you put in this:

-Dtycho-version=4.0.0
# probably add more here ..

You can now control your Tycho version for .mvn/extensions.xml and your pom.xml in one place and still override it on the commandline with -Dtycho-version=...