Jason, Here's a gist of our conversation this morning. Please refer to this thread for a further background http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@geronimo.apache.org/msg17578.html
So we agreed that the following structure of the itests subproject with m2 would be good. - geronimo - itests - system-tests - container-tests - misc-tests The parent level pom for this subproject is in itests directory. It will setup the project for tests by having a dependency on the geronimo distribution jars. It will download the jars and unpack them in it's target directory. The system-tests module contains core system level tests like start server, deploy modules, stop server etc. For now we can't use the maven-cargo-plugin (v0.7) because it doesn't support Jetty container. After our conversation, I learnt from Vincent that v0.8 plugin of Cargo supports Jetty 5.x and Tomcat 6.x too. (http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@geronimo.apache.org/msg17658.html) I need to verify if that doesn't impose a requirement of JDK 1.5 for Jetty goals. G isn't ready to use JDK 1.5 yet. So until then, we'll continue to use our homegrown geronimo-deployment-plugin which I have now ported for m2. I'll look into modifying it to have the same configuration parameters as Cargo so that we can swap out the plugins when Cargo and G are compatible. Other modules and components can contribute their tests to one of the many categories (== sub-directories). I noticed that m2 currently doesn't allow interspersing of goals from 2 different plugins. So when I execute a goal from a plugin between 2 goals from another plugin, only the second goal of the 2 goals is executed. I believe that this could be a bug that you kindy agreed to look into. This is a much required feature for us esp if others contribute their tests and ned to invoke it between our goals. The workaround you suggested was to make my goals come from different plugins. (is that my correct understanding ?) The next issue was that of the verifier plugin. The maven-verifier-plugin may have to be slightly enhanced to continue on error for some tests. This will a new configuration parameter. Some goals may have to write their own verifier if the generic verifier by maven is not sufficient for them. Lastly, when publishing the results, I noticed that the site goal generates html docs in the target directory of each subfolder. The results have to be collated at the top level parent directory. I'm looking to see how I can workaround it. Let me know if you can think of anything else to make it better. Cheers Prasad.