Development Process

Deploying snapshots lowers the bar to entrance for potential users.
Plugins on the website should gather people willing to work on them. We hope at least 2 people will know how an individual plugin works.

Versioning and Release Strategy

We follow the versioning from Maven itself:

x.y.z-alpha-n: Alpha version, not feature complete.
x.y.z-beta-n: Beta version, complete for the next release, not fully tested/documented.
x.y.z: "Proper" release.

Where:

x is the major version: updated when it is not backwards compatible with the previous version.
y is the minor version: updated when features are added.
z is the micro version: service release, only bugfixes.

Plugins can have snapshot versions deployed for testing, or beta/alpha releases deployed for wider testing and a bit more stability.

Once a plugin is ready for another release, follow the checklist for performing a release.

To debug Maven 2/3 with IDEA use this command:

MAVEN_OPTS="-Xdebug -Xnoagent -Djava.compiler=NONE -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=y,address=5005"
mvn install