Ever since we got close to having an m2 build we've been having
problems with the car plugin overloading the maven scopes to mean
something in geronimo. This has caused endless problems, the latest
of which is that in order to be able to use the car plugin outside
geronimo, you have to have built geronimo on that machine so all the
geronimo bits you need are sure to be there. In more detail this is
caused by the use of the provided scope to mean "don't stick this
dependency in the environment". So, if you mark a builder car as
provided so it won't get stuck in the environment, maven won't
download all the bits it needs to run.
This is all caused by our attempt to build the environment plan
element from the pom. The main reason I wanted to do that was to be
sure that if you mentioned something in the environment, maven would
make sure it was available. So, maybe it's time to take a more
direct approach:
How about changing the plugin so it doesn't generate the environment
element, but instead verifies that all the environment dependencies
are mentioned in the pom? Among other things this will give easier
control over which versions are included in the environment element.
The other possible solutions to this problem I have thought of are:
-- get maven to have an extensible scope system or allow dependency
annotations like you could do in maven 1. I think there's no chance
of this happening before geronimo 3, but I could be wrong.
-- copy the environment dependencies into the car plugin
configuration. I think this would end up being harder to deal with
than validating the environment against the pom.
-- write a maven project that just has dependencies on all geronimo
artifacts included in any geronimo assembly, so you can build it and
all the bits will be around for the car plugin to use.
Thanks to gnodet for pointing out this problem and discussing
possible solutions.
Any thoughts?
thanks
david jencks
