Confluence 8.5 LTS is available now

[Wendy]

Hi everyone,

The Confluence 8.5 Long Term Support release is available now.

Download the latest version

This GA release was made available on 22 August 2023.

To learn more, see Confluence 8.5 Release Notes.

[scottohara]

One minor thing we have found, and this could be just a timing issue, or it could be something that wasn’t ever really officially supported, or it could be something that was previously supported but no longer is…

For many years, in our pom.xml files for our Confluence apps, we have specified the confluence.version and confluence.data.version properties as RELEASE, e.g.

<project>
    ...
    <dependencies>...</dependencies>
    <build>....</build>
    <properties>
        <confluence.version>RELEASE</confluence.version>
        <confluence.data.version>RELEASE</confluence.data.version>
        ...
    </properties>
</project>

My understanding (not being a particular expert in Maven) is that RELEASE (along with LATEST) are “metaversions” that point to the latest non-snapshot, and latest snapshot artifacts (respectively).

In practice this has meant that our devs don’t need to update the pom.xml every time a new Confluence release is made available.
Just a quick atlas-clean && atlas-run gets them running against whatever the latest published release version is.

At the time of writing (Wednesday 23 August 2023, 14:31 AEST) the RELEASE metaversion is still resolving to confluence-webapp-8.4.2.war

It is reasonable to assume that RELEASE will eventually resolve to confluence-webapp-8.5.0.war?
Or is it not recommended to use metaversions like this, and to explicitly specify a version instead?

(For what it’s worth I discovered an old Maven 3.x Compatibility Notes document from 11 years ago that mentioned metaversions being dropped; so it does sound like we shouldn’t be using these any more).

[Wendy]

Hi @scottohara, I’ve passed your question to the Confluence product team. Here’s their response:

From the Confluence product side, our plugins don’t use such metadata like RELEASE or LATEST. Our recommendation is to use a concrete version instead.

Does that help? Let me know if not, and I’ll get one of our product devs to chime in directly. Thanks!

[scottohara]

Thanks Wendy, that answers my question