Why can't the dependency plugin be used to install the car files?
I'm not sure what you mean by the dependency plugin.
http://mojo.codehaus.org/dependency-maven-plugin/
It basically handles copying (or unpacking) artifacts and their
dependencies to somewhere other than the repo cache.
I haven't thought through yet whether using maven dependencies to
determine what to copy to the repo is likely to work. The reason
it's not obvious is that we have a different classloader structure
than maven, and 2 ways of getting most jars onto the classpath:
either include the jar directly or import a car that has the jar in
its classpath. These have very different effects on how many
copies of the jar are in use, hence on whether you will get
surprising class cast exceptions. When we are building, first we
built all the jars so there's no chance to use a car just to get a
set of dependencies into the classpath as we do in runtime.
Hrm... to bad we don't use ClassWorlds and then just expose the
classworld config... oh well :-(
I'm not completely sure how it will work out but I think it likely
that just using the maven dependencies (if we can get them
accurate) will supply the correct set of dependencies intalled into
the g. repo. It's certainly worth some experimentation.
It sounds like the Maven depends should be sufficient.
--jason