I was hoping to get some discussion going about http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-2546. For handling eclipse plugins this is a big issue. I really see this as extending the support that maven provides to single project builds to multi-project builds. A lot of plugins dynamically add information to a MavenProject instance such as new source paths, dependencies, resources, etc. These plugins can typically do their job by binding to a phase before the information is needed. Plugins functioning in multi-project reactor builds need the same thing but maven does not provide a phase to bind to before the reactor build is kicked off. I have fixed this for the maven 2.1 trunk and passed all 101 tests. Do I need to submit a patch now or is this consider blasphemous and it needs to be aired out a little bit in discussion?
For those who are interested I extended the LifecycleExecuter interface and added a method that will do reactor builds for a single phase, super-init. The ReactorManager picked up a new method, sortProjects(List projects) that sorts the projects and I removed the final modifier from the sorter attribute because if the super-init phase is executed then we need the ability to reset the field with a new ProjectSorter instance. The Lifecycle class has methods getPhases() and getDefaultPhases(), however the getPhases() method would create and set a new empty list if the attribute was null while the getDefaultPhases() method would just return null. I changed the getDefaultPhases() method to work similar and it now creates and sets an empty map if the attribute is null. The DefaultLifecycleExecutor was changed to extend my LifecycleExecutor extension and implement the executeSuperInit() method. The executeSuperInit() method creates a single goal, super-init, and then executes it. A <lifecycle> element with the id, super-init and a single phase also named super-init was added to the components.xml. The phase has no plugin bindings. Finally the DefaultMaven class has picked up a method to check if any projects in the reactor has plugin execution bindings to the super-init phase. If so then the LifecycleExecutor is called to execute the super-init phase and then if there are no errors the reactor's projects are resorted and normal reactor processing kicks in. This is all 100% backwards compatible because unless you bind a plugin to the phase then the extra processing won't happen and it will be business as usual. Right now this is working great, but is it a direction maven intends to support? Wb
