We have a problem but I don't know what the solution is. Specifying a specific version in dependsOn is a serious problem because there is no concept of "anything newer than X" so if for example you are writing a plugin that can work with 1.0-RC1-SNAPSHOT but you're installing the plugin into a 1.0-RC2-SNAPSHOT application, it will fail to load. This is a serious limitation but without enforcing some kind of numbering scheme I don't know how we can do it. Compare numerically up to the first non-numeric char? I think this was mooted before. It needs to be sorted out before 1.0 final if we want the plugin marketplace to work.