How to break a maven build when dependencies are out of date?

I love the maven-versions-plu开发者_开发问答gin but sometimes I forget to run it for a while. Is there a way to make a maven build fail (and thus have a continuous build fail) when certain important dependencies are out of date?

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I think you're approaching this incorrectly. Mail yourself the output of the maven-versions-plugin if you want, but don't fail the build due to changes outside of your control.

Even more, why would you want to needlessly update to the latest versions? I have seen many tricky problems appear due to upgrades which have brought slight changes to previous behaviour.

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This, in general, is a bad practice - to update versions automatically. There is no practical reason of using the latest version of any package. If the library you're using satisfies your requirements you should stay with this version for security/stability reasons. And forever.

I think that maven-versions-plugin is an anti-pattern itself.

ps. When and if you want to do integration testing of modules developed by different teams/programmers, it is "integration testing". Even in this case I still think that on-fly version updating is the wrong approach. Root project should not do this integration testing, instead, every sub-module (or JAR, in your case), has to be responsible for integration testing of itself together with the rest of the system. When a sub-module increases its version it has to validate whether everything is still fine, and only then has to release a new version to the repository. And when the sub-module is doing the validation it has to be dependent on statically specified version numbers.