[jkschneider]

UpgradeDependencyVersion treats Maven meta-versions RELEASE and LATEST as literal exact versions: Maven silently leaves dependencies unchanged, while Gradle can write those strings into dependency declarations.

Normalize the case-insensitive JVM aliases to latest.release and latest.integration before selecting a comparator. This reuses existing version ordering, metadata-pattern filtering, and release/prerelease behavior. The Semver ecosystem cache and existing explicit-exact parsing remain intact.

Validation:

• Deterministic Maven and Gradle RewriteTest fixtures use mocked metadata, canonical-selector controls, exact pins, version patterns, and two-cycle idempotency checks.
• Supplemental tests against artifacts attesting to the base source commit: baseline 10 passing controls and 12 expected alias failures; candidate 22/22 passing.
• Supplemental compilation of the current Semver package and its full tests: 352 passing, one existing disabled test, three existing assumption aborts, zero failures.
• Full repository CI passed on the reviewed final head. Local Gradle compilation was blocked before project code by unavailable Code Genome build-plugin credentials.

Fixes https://github.com/moderneinc/customer-requests/issues/3129.