On reflection we feel that moving modules/third-party parts into separate Git repositories was a mistake on a few levels:

• My initial thinking was to have separate versioning for the main project and modules, but this quickly turned out to be not something people want
• The level of coordination required to synchronise version numbers and perform a synchronised release, across repos, is too much. We can automate some, but not all of the process, and edge cases really hurt us.
• This has resulted in the modules neither being released independently (freely) nor in sync - so we have the worst of both worlds, sadly.

As such, we've decided we'd like to bring all modules back in to this testcontainers-java repo.

Firstly, we need permission from the authors of each of the modules where another organisation is marked as the copyright owner. We will, of course, do whatever's right and works for all concerned. If the following people wouldn't mind making their views known I'd be most grateful.

• testcontainers-java-module-vault: @mikeoswald
• testcontainers-java-module-mssqlserver: @StefanHufschmidt

Then, some other challenges we want to address as part of this exercise:

• How do we keep the build fast?: Gradle build cache should help a lot (Gradle #574)
• Is Maven holding us back in keeping the build fast? see above
• What's our release process?
• How do we ensure that module owners/'authoritative people' have the right involvement in reviewing changes and deciding when to make a release?: Github CODEOWNERS feature will help.
• Rework to documentation (add mention of modules)

cc @kiview @bsideup