Hi @amy.j ,
Without a reliable publish date, there's no reasonable way to rely on an automated compliance rule that relies on the publish date.
I would recommend developing a Maven-specific approach, since this feed type is so limited. You've probably noticed it already, but license detection is also not very reliable. But, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Keep in mind:
the Java ecosystem seems to publish much less frequently than JavaScript
there are fewer transient dependencies in Java
version ranges tend to be less popular and much more conservative
Also there seems to be an issue with pulling in certain jar files, eg, when org.springframework:spring-webflux 6.2.19 is promoted no jar file is listed - so cannot be consumed. This has happened for a few packages.
This is probably related to that unreliable Maven Index file.
The Maven API does not support "file listing", so there's no automated way to know what artifacts are contained within a particular release. You just "kinda know" by reading the project's release notes, etc.
Early on, we just "assumed" there would always a .jar file, but I guess that's not the case because there are .war and .ear files too. We also considered parsing the web-based file listing page (e.g. spring-webflux/6.2.19, but a lot of repositories don't provide a listing.
We're open to ideas, but it's just an unfortunately limited ecosystem.
Thanks,
Alana