I completely agree with you about having plugins actually be the ones doing their stuff with the sources. However, maven has to provide basic facilities to plugins for dealing with source directories, and for expressing these in the POM (in a section specific to that plugin is fine). What feels inherently wrong about the present setup is that the POM specifically knows about 4 different source directory types, and stops there. It should really only know about 'source directories', and stop there. What is done with the directories is a function of metadata (not expressed as xml elements, as presently done) attached to those entries, or the fact thay they are in a plugin specific section, and various plugins which act on that. Something similar to Michal's proposal is actually a lot cleaner than the present setup.
Very well put.
One other thing worth mentioning: source directories are not just source directories. The build tools maven uses 'fan-in' source directories to output directories, and the output directories may appear as one of the source directories in the next stage in a pipeline. I think maven may well be missing a something because the piplelines aren't explicit.
Maven currently describes a 'best practice' build network through goal dependencies, but the notion of what is being passed /through/ the network - something like ant FileSets - is missing or obscured, and each plugin to some extent has to 'rediscover' what that data was.
Suppose maven was designed so that we could say "goal A's input is the output of goals B, C, and D", instead of just "goal A depends on B, C, D". <source>s would appear as input-less goals, and most plugins would require utput path properties, not input path properties. Just a thought.
-Baz
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