Not sure if anyone has thought of this... But, here's what we've been thinking lately.
Wouldn't it be nice, if the eclipse:generate-classpath could generate a .classpath file with references to src attachments? Furthermore, wouldn't it also be nifty, if when deploying jars, you could tell Maven to build a src zip/jar and deploy that too (with jar:deploy or jar:deploy-snapshot). So, if I were a developer on log4j, I could put something in project.xml or project.properties to identify that the src jar/zip should be produced from the sources that generated the log4j jar. This would populate the repository with both log4j-1.2.8.jar and log4j-1.2.8-src.jar. Then, as a user of log4j, I could then identify in my <resources> entry that I wanted Maven to fetch both jars when fetching dependencies. Finally, when running eclipse:generate-classpath, it would generate entries referring to said src jars. (and possibly update the javadoc locations.. see the last few paragraphs)
So, I can see 3 different things that would need to be implemented
1) Somehow extend the POM to identify that when a jar is built & deployed, the src should be built & deployed too. Both in the snapshot & regular case
2) Define something (possibly a property) in the dependency tag to let the client know it should fetch the jar & src jar.
3) Update the eclipse plugin to generate the proper classpath entry to reference the src jar in addition to the code jar (if it notices the property defined in #2)
Right now, the generate-classpath goal goes through the dependencies in a project and generates lines like this:
<classpathentry kind="var" path="MAVEN_REPO/log4j/jars/log4j-1.2.8.jar"> </classpathentry>
But, it could just as easily generate a line like this:
<classpathentry kind="var"
path="MAVEN_REPO/log4j/jars/log4j-1.2.8.jar" sourcepath="MAVEN_REPO/log4j/jars/log4j-1.2.8-src.jar">
</classpathentry>
In our first attempt, we put in multiple dependency entries, one for the jar, one for the src. Then, we modified the eclipse:generate-classpath plugin, added a property: <jar.src>true<jar.src> to the log4j dependency. Like this
<dependency> <id>log4j</id> <version>1.2.8</version> <url>http://jakarta.apache.org/log4j</url> <properties> <war.bundle>true</war.bundle> <jar.src>true</jar.src> </properties> </dependency> <dependency> <id>log4j</id> <version>1.2.8-src</version> <url>http://jakarta.apache.org/log4j</url> <properties> <war.bundle>false</war.bundle> </properties> </dependency>
It would be nice to make the above just a single entry, and somehow have the guy who downloads dependencies notice that if there's a "jar.src" entry there, it should download the src jar too. Then we could remove the 2nd dependency completely.
As an extra, we also thought of adding a URL to the dependency entry to point specifically at the javadoc location on the doc site. Then, we could update the associated javadocs URL in eclipse, so when you press "shift-f2" when your cursor is positioned on a class, it would bring up the full javadocs for that class. But, the problem is, the javadoc locations in eclipse are stored here: workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse/jdt.ui/javadoclocations.xml. And an entry in that file looks like this:
<location_01
path="C:/Projects/maven-repo/log4j/jars/log4j-1.2.8.jar" url="http://jakarta.apache.org/log4j/docs/api/"/>
Eclipse has fully pathed out the "variable" reference and placed it in a separate file outside the project!.. So, we're not sure what to do here, even though it would be nice if the eclipse plugin could somehow update this stuff too.
Anyways, just thought we'd post our ideas, and see if anyone has any suggestions or better ideas to solve this set of problems.
Thanks,
Leif Nelson Mark McBride
