Support Gradle wildcard version or placeholder variable in dependency management recipes

[MagicalAsh]

What problem are you trying to solve?

My organization regularly wildcards the patch version for projects rather than using an explicit version as it helps to avoid the churn of versioning artifacts explicitly, but we use OpenRewrite to change the versions of several artifacts at once across many repositories. We'd like to have the ability to specify a version of a.b.+ to better support this. We also use placeholders in several locations (i.e. a version of ${dependencyVersion}) which would also be helpful but might be out-of-scope for this issue. I can open another issue for this work if you'd like.

Describe the solution you'd like

When running the AddDependency recipe (or other dependency management recipes), I'd like to be able to specify version: 1.2.+ and have the resulting added dependency be wildcarded properly.

Have you considered any alternatives or workarounds?

A rawVersion property or similar would be just as useful and would allow for wildcarding and for placeholders.

Are you interested in contributing this feature to OpenRewrite?

I'd be interested in contributing but given how busy I am I likely won't be able to work on it anytime soon. I'll update if I find time to work on this.

[timtebeek]

hi! We already support various version patterns, but do not yet support anything like an explicit version wildcard that should be used as a literal, not resolved to and replaced with an actual version.

To be clear: are you only expecting to use this for recipes you'll write yourself? And then only for Gradle?

Or are you expecting the same to be used for say existing Spring Boot migration recipes?

[MagicalAsh]

For now, I'd expect locally only or at most an option on the Spring Boot recipes to wildcard patch version. I'll defer to y'all about the most appropriate usage within rewrite itself as there is something to be said about using explicit versions, it's just incredibly inconvenient for us.

The version placeholder is supported by both maven and gradle, but it looks like the wildcard .+ option is only supported by gradle. We use gradle exclusively so that's what I'm interested in, but I'd be OK with ensuring it works properly with Maven as well through some compatibility/translation logic of some kind.

Thanks for the quick response Tim! :)