Dear Maven Developers,
today I'd like to propose a new core feature of Maven: Maven Workflows. Since several time there had been workflow-style plugins, i. e. plugins that simply execute mojos of other plugins in a particular sequence. Well-known examples are the Maven Release Plugin (which implements a flow of SCM and Version operations), the Git-Flow Maven Plugin (which implements a flow of SCM operations) and in some why the Groovy Maven Plugin (which, besides custom code, is able to invoke Maven plugin to implement a flow). Some people start coding custom plugins for more custom flows, other people use bash scripting to implement their flows using a sequence of mvn invocations, both with the benefit that neither Maven itself nor Maven-enabled tools (like IDEs or CI/CD) neither "see" nor "understand" these workflows -- hence cannot support custom workflows, or only with a lot of more custom code (like custom IDE plugins). It is time to discuss the ideo of natively supporting Workflows! What I like to propose is: * Maven core has new interface "Workflow", is able to customize it using <workflow> POM elements. * A "Workflow" is defined as a sequence of plugin executions. Workflows can includes <if> or <case> to query properties. * A new "Maven Workflow Plugin", is able to execute workflows. * IDEs can "see" and execute workflows. This is just a core idea and certainly needs more in-depth thoughts. But so far, what do you think? -Markus
