I spend most of the weekend trying to restructure trunk to reflect the new flexible server and I should tell you, it has been one shitty job much akin to untangling the knots of Medusa's hair.
To begin with I wanted to build just the modules and configs (along with the necessary buildsupport and maven-plugins artifacts) that go into a framework assembly.I believe that if we effectively want to restructure the build tree to reflect the flexible server, then we should be able to build just the framework artifacts ONLY. The framework artifacts should not have a dependency on plugins artifacts because they are optionally choosen to build an assembly of choice. Also, if our strategic vision is to break down the tree into smaller projects for framework, plugins etc, this we should break this cyclical dependency too. See Jason's response here - http://www.nabble.com/forum/ViewPost.jtp?post=12460948&framed=y&skin=134 First hitch - Our framework assembly contains jee-specs car. This car has a dependency on o.a.myfaces.core/myfaces-api jar. Either this is in a incorrect dependency which we don't need at this point or it might be truly needed here so that it gets in the classpath for later use. I commented this dependency out and proceeded to build jee-specs car. I strongly tend to believe that this myfaces dep is wrongly placed here. If it is really req'd then we have a bigger problem of fixing our classloader scheme. Second hitch - Trying to build framework assembly's server-security-config car requires you to build j2ee-deployer. If you wish to build j2ee-deployer, it pulls in other j2ee-* modules and cars which in turn has a dependency on webservices. Slowly we are building more and more plugins which are optional artifacts. If we really have to build a lot of plugins just to build the framework artifacts, then there is little point in restructuring the build tree now or breaking the tree later. I have checked in the restructured code under sandbox/restructure. I have been able to do a bootstrap build thus far. To build this on your machine, take the following steps 1) begin with a good local repository for your trunk build 2) delete applications, assemblies, modules, geronimo, configs, plugins and mavenplugin dirs under .m2/org/apache/geronimo dir of your local repo. 3) svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/geronimo/sandbox/restructure 4) mvn -o -Dstage=bootstrap 5) mvn -o -Dstage=assembly <---- You should fail here Cheers Prasad