It appears that a gap in two of our tools was found today when dealing with unreleased dependency tags.

The tool that validates versions in POMs are valid should flag when an unreleased tag doesn't match the development version defined by the library that is being used in an unreleased state. For example, the library lists 1.0.0 as the latest released version and 1.1.0-beta.2 as the in-development version, if an unreleased tag is using 1.1.0-beta.1 this should be flagged as an error.

The tool that prepares a library for release doesn't update any associated unreleased version tags. When releasing a library with other libraries depending on an unreleased version of it, the unreleased version tag needs to update to the version being released, otherwise the downstream libraries will try to use a version that doesn't exist in Maven nor will be built locally. For example, the library was listing 1.1.0-beta.2 as the in-development version and it is now preparing to release as 1.1.0, the unreleased tag needs to be updated to 1.1.0.