[LUCENE-10386] Add BOM module for ease of dependency management in dependent projects

• Type: Wish
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Trivial
• Resolution: Won't Fix
• Affects Version/s: 9.0, 8.4, 8.11.1
• Component/s: general/build
• Labels: BOM Dependencies
• Lucene Fields: New
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Petr Portnov
• Created: 23/Jan/22 14:08
• Updated: 28/Aug/22 16:35
• Resolved: 07/Aug/22 13:52

Description

Short description

Add a Bill-of-Materials (BOM) module to Lucene to allow foreign projects to use it for dependency management.

Reasoning

A lot of multi-module projects are providing BOMs in order to simplify dependency management. This allows dependant projects to only specify the version of the BOM module while declaring the dependencies without them (as the will be provided by BOM).

For example:

dependencies {
    // Only specify the version of the BOM
    implementation platform('com.fasterxml.jackson:jackson-bom:2.13.1')

    // Don't specify dependency versions as they are provided by the BOM
    implementation "com.fasterxml.jackson.core:jackson-annotations"
    implementation "com.fasterxml.jackson.core:jackson-core"
    implementation "com.fasterxml.jackson.core:jackson-databind"
    implementation "com.fasterxml.jackson.dataformat:jackson-dataformat-yaml"
    implementation "com.fasterxml.jackson.datatype:jackson-datatype-guava"
    implementation "com.fasterxml.jackson.datatype:jackson-datatype-jdk8"
    implementation "com.fasterxml.jackson.datatype:jackson-datatype-jsr310"
    implementation "com.fasterxml.jackson.module:jackson-module-parameter-names"
}

 
Not only is this approach "popular" but it also has the following pros:

• there is no need to declare a variable (via Maven properties or Gradle ext) to hold the version
• this is more automation-friendly because tools like Dependabot only have to update the single version per dependency group

Other suggestions

It may be reasonable to also publish BOMs for old versions so that the projects which currently rely on older Lucene versions (such as 8.4) can migrate to the BOM approach without migrating to Lucene 9.0.

Issue Links

• links to: GitHub Pull Request #830