Hi, I am currently working on finetuning the workflows on a large application that was migrated from an Ant based build to one based upon Maven.
The build itself is running smoothly but, what I'm currently working on is getting the release workflow optimized. The project consists of about 50 Maven artifacts. A lot of people are using this project all over the world. The client is distributed by some web-start similar solution. The problem is whenever a bugfix-release is done, we don't want to release all modules in a new version because then all of these would have to be downloaded by the clients. So we have a project with a lot of modules and a parent pom that configures the plugins. Using the regular maven-release-plugin involves a lot of manual adjusting of version numbers and I would like to eliminate this. That's why I setup the master pom to have two profiles "develop" (active by default) and "release" activated during a release. In both profiles a lot of properties are configured to be used for setting the artifact versions. No comes the part where I was told on the dev-list that I was tempted by the dark side of the force ;-) In my master pom, I defined one major dependencyManagement section fixing the version of each artifact to the versions in the properties. Ok ... so this is normal and this is not "dark side magic". But in order to have the parent version automatically configured the right way I wanted to have the version of the parent link configured by these properties too. Ok so maven doesn't allow this. But it seems that this is not entirely true: If I configre the version of the artifact I want to use as parent with the same variable as I am using in the parent definition of the child module. Maven seems to work fine with that. The only thing that I was not quite satisfied with, was that the install plugin installed the raw poms into my local repo. The directory it was installed to contained the correct version so the resolution must have worked. That's why I thought this was a bug in the deploy plugin and that's why I filed an issue (which was immediately closed because I was doing bad magic) http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-5358 I attached an example project containing an example configuration demonstrating what I was doing. What I find particularly strange is that Maven claims not to resolve properties in project.version and project.parent.version and in 90% of the cases this is true: Let me illustrate thsi a little. Assuming I have only two projects ... one master and one module. If I define two properties in my master pom: "my.cool.master.version" and "my.cool.alternate.master.version" and set both to the same value of "1.2-SNAPSHOT". In szenario 1: I hard code the version of the master to "1.2-SNAPSHOT" but use the property to reference the parent from the moule ... when running a build, maven tries to download "de/mycompany/test/${my.cool.master.version}/mycoolmaster-${my.cool.master.version}.pom" --> Failure, because the property is not resolved In szenario 2: I use the same variable for defining the masters version. This time the maven build runs fine and the parent version is correctly resolved. In szenario 3: I use the first property to define the version of the master and the second one for referncing the parent from the module ... when running a build, maven tries to download "de/mycompany/test/${my.cool.alternate.master.version}/mycoolmaster-${my.cool.alternate.master.version}.pom" --> Failure, because the property is not resolved So to me it looks as if there was some sort of intention behind everything and not a bug in the system as I was told on the dev-list. To me it looks like one teeniewienie loophole allowing properies in versions while closing the usage range so much that possible harm is reduced to it's absolute minimum. So it seems that my usecase seems to be the onlly one allowed. After all ... this is a problem users are begging for maven to provide a solution since maven 2.0 (When looking at the forums). Ok ... and now to finish the loop back to my topic: If I am doing bad sourcery ... how would I setup one maven build to allow simple releases of individual modules with individual versions? Chris [ C h r i s t o f e r D u t z ] C-Ware IT-Service Inhaber Dipl. Inf. Christofer Dutz Karlstraße. 104, 64285 Darmstadt [cid:[email protected]]<http://www.benchpark.com/788335/kundenzufriedenheit.htm> IT- und Systemhäuser<http://www.benchpark.com/it_und_systemhaeuser.htm> fon: 0 61 51 / 27315 - 61 fax: 0 61 51 / 27315 - 64 mobil: 0171 / 7 444 2 33 email: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://www.c-ware.de<http://www.c-ware.de/> UStId-Nr. DE195700962
