Version Drift and the Repos You Forgot
I asked a simple question after the last session’s work: are we still aligned with the rest of CaseHub? The answer was no — in two directions. The npm packages had been bumped to 0.3.0, ahead of casehub-parent’s 0.2-SNAPSHOT. The Maven backend modules were still at 0.1-SNAPSHOT, behind it.
The fix was mechanical — 7 npm package.json files back to 0.2.0, 7 Maven pom.xml files forward to 0.2-SNAPSHOT. But the interesting part was tracing the blast radius.
Who actually depends on us?
I expected DraftHouse and Connectors to be the obvious consumers. DraftHouse doesn’t reference any pages modules yet — the typed push SDK adoption is filed but not started. Connectors has exactly one dependency: casehub-pages-auth at 0.1-SNAPSHOT in chat-demo/pom.xml. That needed bumping.
AML was the surprise. On its issue-91-aml-workbench-ui branch, the webui declares npm dependencies using file: protocol references:
{
"@casehubio/pages-runtime": "file:../../../../../pages/packages/pages-runtime"
}
Five levels of ../ to reach a sibling checkout. This means AML’s frontend only builds if casehub-pages is checked out as a sibling under the same parent directory. Neither repo documents this. The version number change doesn’t affect it — file: resolves by path, not version — but it’s the kind of invisible coupling that breaks someone’s first day on the project.
Making it stick
The version alignment itself is a one-off fix. The rule — that all casehub-pages modules track casehub-parent’s major.minor — is a standing constraint. We formalised it as a project protocol: npm packages use <major>.<minor>.0 matching parent’s <major>.<minor>-SNAPSHOT, Maven modules use the same SNAPSHOT version. When either moves, downstream consumers with hardcoded versions must move too.
The broader pattern: version drift in a multi-repo ecosystem doesn’t announce itself. Each repo bumps independently, and the divergence only surfaces when someone asks a question like “wait, is this still aligned?” Worth asking periodically rather than waiting for a build to break.