Suppose you have a plugin A with an incremental version of 1.1-rc100.etc, a plugin B depending on A in that version, and a plugin C also depending on A in that version, but additionally depending on B. Now you wish to test a matching change between A and C. So you edit A and build it, producing 1.1-SNAPSHOT, and change C’s POM to depend on that. But some functional tests (at least InjectedTest.testPluginActive) will fail, because the Jenkins plugin manager refuses to load B: it considers 1.1-SNAPSHOT to be older than the expressed dependency version, 1.1-rc100.etc.

While in general we do not really know whether a snapshot is older or newer than anything else in its version range, since it could have been built from anything, it is more convenient to assume that it is relatively new.

Maven’s ComparableVersion does consider the snapshot to be newer, but lib-version-number currently does not. We prefer to have our library, and thus Jenkins core and associated tooling like maven-hpi-plugin, match Maven’s semantics wherever applicable.