Should Maven dependency version ranges be considered deprecated?

Question

Given that it\'s very hard to find anything about dependency version ranges in the official documentation (the best I could come up with is http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVE

Answer 1

Version ranges are the only reason that Maven is still useful. Even considering not using them is bad practice as it leads you into the disaster of multi-module builds, non-functional parent poms, builds that take 10 minutes or longer, badly structured projects like Spring, Hibernate and Wicket as we cover on our Illegal Argument podcast.

To answer your question, they are not deprecated and are actively used in many projects successfully (except when Sonatype allows corrupt metadata into Apache Maven Central).

If you want a really good example of a non-multi-module build (reactor.xml's only) where version ranges are used extensively, go look at Sticky code (http://code.google.com/p/stickycode/)