Source jar + POM changes
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Key: MNG-2531
URL: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-2531
Project: Maven 2
Issue Type: Improvement
Components: POM
Reporter: Brian Topping
Priority: Minor
[This idea is kind of half-baked, but please think it through. I think it
could save a lot of time if it worked.]
Would it be reasonable to automatically create some kind of source jar for
projects when they are built? All the data is there to create the source tree,
and if it was, the POM could be extended such that the IDE plugins such as IDEA
could make use of knowing where the sources are for a dependency, download and
unjar them automagically as a part of the build, then configure the IDE
project so the sources were linked to the JAR.
I'm thinking about this because the IDE plugins are really one of the best
integrations with the IDEs, but when one rebuilds the IDE project file, the
source links are typically destroyed. If you have several dependencies in your
IDE that you have to re-establish the source link with every time you rebuild
the project, the expense of using the IDE plugin goes way up. When that
happens, the IDE becomes an easier place to make the changes, and sometimes
these changes get forgotten about, breaking the Maven build. If that's the
de-facto build for an organization (because the IDEs can generate from it),
then it's a problem.
Another (probably easier) option would be to upgrade all the IDE plugins to
cache the existing source locations for JARs across runs of the project
generation, but it does require an implementation for each IDE plugin.
Storing sources in the Maven repos are probably not the ideal situation, but
putting hardcoded source addresses in the POM would not work either because
developers typically have different locations for things. It might be possible
to set it up so the local source addresses are stored in the user properties,
but that sounds like a very difficult thing to do in a clean manner.
Thanks for reading this rather long winded brainstorm.
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