When to get rid of '-SNAPSHOT'

Question

I'm working on a Git workflow (not git-flow) for a Java project that uses Maven and Artifactory for artifact storage. On develop and feature/* branches the version number contains '-SNAPSHOT'. It is not desirable to have release/* or master branches with '-SNAPSHOT' so I'm trying to figure out when (and how) to get rid of it.

I came up with a partial workflow, as below, but it doesn't handle removing 'SNAPSHOT':

                v1.0-snap    v1.0-snap
feature/a       * ---------> *
                ^            |
                |            |
                |            v
develop         *            * v1.0-snap
                v1.0-snap    |
                             |
                             v        
release/1.1        v1.0-snap * -----> *
                                    v1.1-snap

I came up with 2 options, but both might be wrong.

Option 1

                v1.0-snap    v1.0-snap
feature/a       * ---------> *
                ^            |
                |            |
                |            v             v1.1-snap
develop         *            * v1.0-snap  *
                v1.0-snap    |           /
                             |          /
                             v         /
release/1.1        v1.0-snap * -----> * v1.1-snap
                                       \
                                        \
                                         \
master                                    * --------> *
                                          v1.1-snap   v1.1

Option 2

                v1.0-snap    v1.0-snap
feature/a       * ---------> *
                ^            |
                |            |
                |            v             v1.1-snap
develop         *            * v1.0-snap  *
                v1.0-snap    |           /
                             |          /
                             v         /
release/1.1        v1.0-snap * -----> * ----- >* v1.1
                                   v1.1-snap    \
                                                 \
                                                  \
master                                             *
                                                  v1.1

Both options seems weird to me, though.

Is there any best practice for this kind of flow?

Answer 1

I have a similar setup.

For feature/* and develop, I use something like 18.08-SNAPSHOT in my pom. When we're ready to start release hardening, I'll cut a release branch (release/18.08) and change the version in the pom/s to 18.08.

I'll also bump the version on develop to 18.09-SNAPSHOT, for example.

From there, bugfix and finalise the release, merge to master when appropriate.

We're not properly CI/CD yet, but the issue I bumped in to with release builds was that I still needed unique builds in Artifactory. So, at build time (for release branches) Jenkins will change the version in the pom to something like 18.08-326 (326 being build number). It won't commit this change, but the artefact that gets built and pushed to Artifactory will be unique (foobar-18.08-326.war)