In our build scripts, we explicitly specify the version of the Maven plugins that we use. This is required in order to create reproducible builds. In the absence of the version, Maven gives a warning such as the following:
[WARNING] Some problems were encountered while building the effective model for com.packt.cookbook:project-with-exec:jar:1.0-SNAPSHOT [WARNING] 'build.plugins.plugin.version' for org.codehaus.mojo:exec-maven-plugin is missing. @ line 42, column 17 [WARNING] [WARNING] It is highly recommended to fix these problems because they threaten the stability of your build. [WARNING] [WARNING] For this reason, future Maven versions might no longer support building such malformed projects.
Over a period of time, there could be updates to these plugins. It would be good to know if there are any so that we can suitably update the plugin versions. Let us see how we can do this.