Grouper fails to start if using snapshot jars.The match pattern for the version string in the jar is e.g. 1.2.3 | 1.2.3rc4 | 1.2.3-rc4. A version of 1.2.3-SNAPSHOT doesn't match any of these. Where the GrouperVersion parse fails and where the actual startup fails are different, and the latter is very hard to trace because the parse failure aborts the ehcache* setup so it ends up being an ehcache issue.
 
(* the actual trigger is that EhcacheController is checking that the current version is greater than 2.3.1, and this is the first point where GrouperVersion parses the actual version instead of a static string)
 
Proposed: a version of a.b.c-SNAPSHOT is considered equivalent to rc version negative-1, so the version will always be less than the same release build including any rcN version.