Ensuring version consistency in a super-build

Version A consistency is an important aspect of all software projects. As you should have learned by now, nothing is set in stone in the software world. Software evolves and changes over time. Such changes often need to be acknowledged in advance, either by running a series of tests against the new version or by making changes to the consuming code itself. Ideally, changes in upstream code should not have an effect on reproducing existing builds, until we want them to do so. A project's x.y version should always be built with the z.q dependency version if the software verification and testing have been done against this combination. The reason for this is that the smallest changes in an upstream dependency may affect the behavior of your software, even though there are no API or ABI changes. Your software will not have well-defined behavior if version consistency is not provided. Thus, having a way to provide version consistency is...