Here's what I'd like to do: For our product, we have a number of Maven
projects, most of which are simple Java jar projects, but others are
not. For these jar projects, I'd like the javadoc:jar and source:jar
goals to execute as well. I'd like this to be as automatic as possible
for projects (i.e. define this in one central place without requiring
individual projects to do anything explicit).
As far as I know, there are three ways to accomplish this. First would
be to add the plugins to the pom.xml for each project. This works, but
requires adding them to each project, defeating my goal to only define
it in one place.
The next way to do this would be to add the plugins to the parent
pom.xml. I can put the information into the pluginManagement section of
the parent, but this still requires that each project's pom contain a
reference to the plugin, which I'd rather not do. The other option is
to put the information in the parent's build-plugins. This actually
does seem to work (the subproject picks it up automatically), but has a
an unpleasant side effect in that these goals are run for all of the
non-jar type projects as well as the jar type projects. Looking a bit
closer, it seems the javadoc:javadoc and source:jar goals are saying
they won't execute because the project isn't the right type, but the
javadoc:jar goal runs anyway, creating a javadoc jar with no actual
javadocs in it. Maybe this is just a bug and I should report/patch it.
The third way to do this would be to add the plugins to a profile and
have the build pick it up there. I'm not as well-versed with profiles,
so I may be missing something here. But from what I know, for this to
work I'd have to specify the profile whenever I build (unless it's the
default) and make sure all of the developers have the correct settings
for their profile definition (or I suppose I can put the profile
definition into the parent pom, but I'm not sure how that works). I
don't think it actually buys me anything to list the plugins in a
profile, though (i.e. it doesn't work any better than listing the
plugins directly in the parent pom).
Anyway, is there a recommended methodology for doing this sort of thing?
Is there something I'm missing that I should be taking advantage of?
Thanks,
..David..
