On 10/12/2010 9:19 PM, Bryan Loofbourrow wrote:
What is the semantic difference between multiple POMs and a single POM containing the 
different module lists in profiles?  It seems like the former is harder to support 
because a change outside the module sets requires changing every POM.<<
Well, one difference is a separation of developer concerns from the concerns of 
the consumers of your artifacts. This is especially applicable if the pom 
containing the profiles is the parent pom of your project, that actually gets 
deployed to a repository and consumed by those who consume your software.

More subtly, I'd argue that the profiles are "magic beans," things for which 
you have to introspect your source code to know what's going on, and not really knowing, 
without extensive examination, whether these profiles have any effect on any of the 
projects in the child tree. In contrast, a developer-facing pom is a distinct file whose 
purpose can be made quite clear at the file system level, and whose purpose is 
unambiguously contained entirely within the file itself.

Descending down to the final level of abstract mysticism, I'd also say that the profiles represent 
a "last resort" in the context of "The Maven Way," a thing you do not use 
unless you must. Yes, we use them -- for things like telling the build to execute integration tests 
that depend on the presence of an active database whose location you have defined in a settings.xml 
file. But for a trivial purpose like this, they are overkill.

+1.

Ron
-- Bryan

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Topping [mailto:topp...@codehaus.org]

Sent: Friday, December 10, 2010 5:37 PM
To: Maven Users List
Subject: Re: Reasonable use of profiles?


On Dec 10, 2010, at 8:08 PM, Bryan Loofbourrow wrote:

You don't need separate projects for this. You just need a bunch of developer-facing 
pom files with different<modules>  lists. They can certainly live in the same 
directory. This is something we definitely take advantage of, for producing 
interesting developer build sets.
What is the semantic difference between multiple POMs and a single POM 
containing the different module lists in profiles?  It seems like the former is 
harder to support because a change outside the module sets requires changing 
every POM.



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