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- Other projects release SNAPSHOTS on a daily basis. Every day you would build Geronimo, the build process will download an and build against newly released artifacts.
- The nature of SNAPSHOT releases is that they are the latest development builds. Though they will be compiled and released, they are not necessarily error free. Additionally, SNAPSHOTS are actively developed and may introduce some new feature or API that might cause Geronimo to fail during its own build.
- Due to the nature of item #1, item #2 may occur on any future day, and item #2 may persist for an unknown amount of time until issues are corrected.
The Apache Geronimo community works with dependency projects to resolve issues that prevent Geronimo from building or passing tests, but this is not always resolvable in a speedy fashion. Sometimes the Geronimo community must make dependency changes to resolve issues with pother other project's artifacts that persist with issues that go unresolved.
To help mask issues like these that can surface, you can setup a local maven proxy repo (like with nexus) and control what artifacts are downloaded and used in the build process. The local proxy repo repository performs the download of 3rd party artifacts Geronimo depends on, and the Geronimo build process obtains the artifacts from itthe local proxy repository. In doing this, artifacts that causes issues can be rolled back to a previous version, or instead you can control what new and updated artifacts are downloaded pause updates on certain problem artifacts by controlling which are updated from the remote repositories for the Geronimo build process to use.
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