Hi all,
I've written up the new features present in the refactored lifecycle
support for 2.1, if anyone is interested in reading it. I'd like to
hear what you all think, particularly about the emerging discussion
of aggregator plugins, pre-exec "plugins", and such taking place on
the page comments.
In brief, we have numerous problems with aggregator plugins, whether
you're talking about binding these to a lifecycle phase, resolving
dependencies of these plugins that actually are present in the
current reactor, timing of execution (particularly in multimodule
builds where the plugin needs the output of module builds, see the
assembly plugin outstanding bugs for this one), and more. In
addition, there has been an expressed need for a sort of pre-
execution phase that would allow plugins to manipulate dependency
lists, mojo bindings, etc. before the build proper starts. Finally,
there is some discussion about mojos that can conditionally choose to
fork a nested execution or not, depending on how they're used...which
also brings up the idea of letting a mojo discover where and how it's
being used.
IMO, these issues represent the next iteration of Maven build
definition. They are the next frontier for the work we're trying to
do in Maven in many ways, and it seems like they deserve a healthy
design discussion each. In the case of aggregator plugins and the pre-
execution phase, it may make more sense to go back to first
principles and see whether we can come up with a single replacement
solution to aggregators that would address both types of problem.
Please comment if you have an opinion on this.
Thanks,
-john
---
John Casey
Committer and PMC Member, Apache Maven
mail: jdcasey at commonjava dot org
blog: http://www.ejlife.net/blogs/john
rss: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ejlife/john
