While working on maven-artifact-transfer (the independent Aether version
bridge) and trying to use it for several plugins I came across some
issues, especially when transitive dependencies are required.
IMO an Artifact is a reference to a File based on coordinated (GAV + type,
which translates to an extension, sometimes with classifier). An artifact
is considered resolved if the File is downloaded.
The artifact itself has no knowledge about transitivity, that's part of
the descriptor. Hence there's no such thing as transitive artifacts.
However,there are a lot of plugins interested in all the transitive
dependencies.
Only for Objects like MavenProject, Plugin (which have dependencies) it
makes sense to ask for such dependencies.
However, a MavenProject is a fully populated instance, which is often too
much if somebody just wants to have all transitive dependencies for a
specific GAV (or Artifact, but I'd like to avoid this term).
It looks like Artifact is often abused for too much information. Aether
already separated resolveArtifact() and resolveDependencies().
Up until now we used to make usage of the ArtifactFactory, but that class
is deprecated. Today I discovered the org.apache.maven.repository.
RepositorySystem to create Artifacts, but there's only 1 implementation:
org.apache.maven.repository.legacy.LegacyRepositorySystem, which is again
part of maven-compat.
Is it still an Artifact we want to create when we are interested in
transitive dependencies?
If so: what's the preferred way? RepositorySystem, which should also get a
non-legacy implementation?
If not: should we introduce something like
ArtifactDescriptor/ArtifactStructure?
Is there a reason why there's no interface for GAV instances usable for
Objects like MavenProject, Plugin and Dependency and Artifact
thanks,
Robert
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected]
For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
