Best practices when using the refreshVersions plugin in a Spring Boot project

[amorozov]

Hello!

I would like to ask how to properly combine refreshVersions plugin with Spring Boot multi-module project.

The problem I'm stuck on:

I have a project with refreshVersions (v0.23) managing all dependencies, particularly everything about Jackson library and its components. The latest version of the latter is 2.13.0, and it's remembered in versions.properties. I have entries like implementation("com.fasterxml.jackson.dataformat:jackson-dataformat-yaml:_") in the dependencies sections of build.gradle.kts files. So far so good.

Now I include some Spring Boot stuff of version 2.5.5 to the project, again through the refreshVersions. Internally this version of Spring Boot depends on Jackson-2.12.5. As the result I get a whole mess of Jackson libraries, some of version 2.12.5 while others of 2.13.0. No doubts, it instantly brings me those wonderful runtime exceptions "method XXX could not be found" deeply inside Jackson components.

I have tried to use the io.spring.dependency-management plugin alongside refreshVersion, and avoid the ":_" part of Spring dependencies specifications altogether, tried to to import mavenBom as dependency-management-plugin docs suggest — nothing actually helps.

So I would like to ask how people solve a problem like this.

Thank you in advance.