I have a Netbeans project with a library defined which includes several JARs. These JARs are versioned like lib\blah\com.blah.wibble.jar_0.6.1.201004161543 . These are nightly builds from another project so that version changes often.
I know I can point NetBeans at the specific JARs with the version name, but this means that every time I get a new version I have to update the NetBeans library.
I can also strip the version name from the JARs, but this makes it hard to track down bugs. “What version of the blah JARs?” is usually the second thing we ask when we find a bug.
Is it possible to tell Netbeans to use included com.blah.wibble.jar_[??????] where ???? is some sort of automatic pointer to use the latest available version?
Consider converting into a maven project and publish new builds into the repository.
Recently logback and other logging frameworks have had added code that adds jar versions to stacktraces based on information in MANIFEST.MF, which is very helpful in reproducing bugs.
For your situation a continous build server might be extremely useful, then you can reproduce exactly those builds reported by users as all information is present in the build server, just by having the build ID from the user.