&gt; I&#x27;m glad they didn&#x27;t. Its not essential to solve the problems the module system is designed to solve, making adoption easier. A mechanism to resolve, download and cache artifacts is still needed anyway, at least I didn&#x27;t see anything in that regard.<p>But, had they included versioning support, they could have also built upon that later to support module distribution to finally not have to worry about maven, ivy, etc.<p>The main difficulty about versioning though are snapshot (development) versions that don&#x27;t have a defined version number. In maven, typically these are just &quot;*-SNAPSHOT&quot; which may not be unique enough if two projects wanted to depend on two different snapshots of the same module.