I've been using Maven for a few months, and I'm to the point where I'd
like to start consolidating some of my custom jelly scripts into my own
plugins. I've started playing with doing this on 1.0-beta-7, and I've
got a few questions:
1. In the plugins directory, each plugin provided by Maven uses the
naming convention maven-something-plugin-x.y for the plugin jar and
directory. I can create my own plugin with some directory name that
completely independent of that naming convention and maven finds the
goals in that plugin with no problem. Is it correct that Maven just
looks for directories in the plugins path and looks for the plugin.jelly
in each of these directories? Is there some more formal description of
this process? Are there significant changes in the beta-8 work that will
affect this process?
2. Maven appears to load goals found in all of the plugins directories
into the appropriate namespaces, so that I can create my own plugin and
put goals into a namespace provided by other plugins. For example,
suppose I create a goal, call it "java:source-jar", in my own plugin. It
is found and processed by Maven into the "java" namespace with no
trouble. Are there any technical reasons this behavior should be
avoided? Are there gotchas that folks have found that I should be aware
of? Does beta-8 change anything in this area?
3. Maven appears to use the last occurrence of a goal it finds. For
example, if I created a goal named "java:jar" that was found by Maven
after the one provided by the Maven java plugin, my definition will be
used. Are there technical issues with exploiting this behavior? Is there
any significant change in beta-8?
4. As I go about choosing namespace names for my own plugin goals, I
want to be careful to try to chose names that are not likely to be
encroached upon by future Maven plugins. Are there any guidelines or
recommendations for how I could go about choosing namespace names with
this in mind? Are there any formal recommendations for choosing
namespaces for plugins?
5. I don't see anything in beta-7 for Maven to download and install
plugins from a repository (remote and/or local) in a manner similar to
the way dependencies are downloaded. Is there any work going on to add
this capability?
I've looked over the online Maven docs and don't see much in the way of
documenting how plugins are managed (i.e., answers to these kinds of
questions). If there is any fine documentation available somewhere, I'll
be glad to go take a look.
TIA
--
Steven Caswell
Software Developer
Mikon Systems, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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