Dangers of mixing artifact versions across maven modules

Sometimes when a quickfix is urgently required, we are tempted to branch off and make it happen on our own until the authors of the original branch release their latest version. I found myself in such a situation and decided to only use the patched version for a small~ish maven module/artifact known in my project as "commons". What could go wrong? Well I ran into the following error at runtime:

java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: org.springframework.amqp.core.AmqpAdmin.declareQueue(Lorg/springframework/amqp/core/Queue;)Ljava/lang/String;

Turns out that my "commons" module was expecting to use a slightly different method signature than what was available in my main project:

// method signature from spring-amqp-1.3.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT
String declareQueue(Queue queue);

// method signature from spring-amqp-1.2.0M1
void declareQueue(Queue queue);

So ... lesson learned :) push the authors to release quicker ;)