Depot Version Overview

Depot Version automates some of the manual checks that users to with versions. It introduces classes to represent versions "numbers" from 1.0 to 1.0.1-rc6 to 2.0-20030221. This is pretty much it, a generic version object, however with this we can start to discover/display/compare/test those versions. Depot Version is a framework under which software can manipulate version information.

Depot Version extracts the versions from various sources in the runtime environment, perhaps extracting Jar manifest files from the Jars in the classpath. It then allows users to display/debug this information and/or evaluate defined constraints upon this version environment. Users (be they developers, testers, operators or end users) can communicate version requirements amongst themselves via constraint files. These sets of constraint are merged and evaluated as one.

Version compatability is a concept where one version of something is "a suitable replacement" for another. Depot Version supports this concept, in algorythm form, however it builds upon it with the concept of version constraints for real world discontinuities that an algorythm can't cover.