Hi all, I regularly hit an issue with plugin definition: it is not possible to define the plugin for children in a parent. Let me detail a concrete case: i want a parent module to define the plugins for children modules but I don't want the parent to have these plugins. A common solution is to skip=true in the parent and skip=false in children but it requires N (number of children) undesired flag (vs 1 for the parent). An example is when I do an ui/ parent (pom packaging) i want to define "npm install && npm run build" using frontend-maven-plugin for all children (spa1, spa2 etc) but I don't want ui/ module itself to run npm since it does not contain any module.
Side note: it is the same if you do an images/ subhierarchy or servers/ subhierarchy. Indeed a trivial trick for the plugin would be to avoid pom packaging but the author rejected the PR doing that saying it is a tool feature not a plugin feature - a bit the same argument that skip should be handled by mojo executor and not each plugin. I did a quick extension workaround ( https://github.com/rmannibucau/hierarchy-extension) to enable to configure the skip toggle the plugin luckily has from the parent and not redefine the chain/toggle in all children but I think we would need to solve it more cleanly at some point. I see a few options (and even if a single one would solve my particular issue, all can be nice feature IMHO): 1. support what I did in the extension in maven-core? 2. support implicit skip toggle for all mojo executions 3. add some virtual properties ${project.packaging.isPom}, ${project.packaging.isNotPom} (potentially others with dynamic evaluations is[Not]XXX) 4. support implicit skipPackagings (list<string>) property for all mojos Overall it ends to either define a pseudo language in placeholders and reuse what is in the plugins or add virutal properties in plugin about the project structure (what maven itself handles). Personally I think this last option is saner on the long run (so 2 and 4 short term) but happy to get some feedback or even existing workaround which does not require to rewire some value in all child or write another extension ;). Romain Manni-Bucau @rmannibucau <https://twitter.com/rmannibucau> | Blog <https://rmannibucau.metawerx.net/> | Old Blog <http://rmannibucau.wordpress.com> | Github <https://github.com/rmannibucau> | LinkedIn <https://www.linkedin.com/in/rmannibucau> | Book <https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/java-ee-8-high-performance>