Hi folks, This is pretty important to start punting around as I need to lock in a best practice that works on Maven 2.0 and can be used in the site plug-in release. Please give this a review as soon as possible.
I am battling the age old question where we have parent as inheritance and parent as a build aggregator. I'm still inclined to think that we should separate the functional from the informational (feedback on http://www.nabble.com/POM-Problems-and-Inheritence-t642303.html#a1708556 still welcome!), we're stuck with the current situation for right now. Recently, we've been talking about making the parents produce aggregated content - assemblies, ears, aggregated site reports. This results in a src/ directory under the root that sits with the parent. I'd alluded to this in http://www.nabble.com/-discuss-change-to-parent-hierachy-t898697.html#a2329650 which I'll revise based on any decision here. Chatting with Jason, we've agreed it doesn't quite feel right, though for my part I'm not convinced it's a bad thing yet but rather just something I'm not used to. The main downside I see remains the inability to do anything with it in Eclipse :) The alternative is to make everything a module of the parent, using dependencies to represent the things to aggregate. This removes the need to make <modules> act like dependencies and keeps the parent clean as an inheritance and build entry point. All the outputs of the build end up in a module. Practical example: maven/components/trunk/ pom.xml maven-artifact/ maven-core/ ... maven-dist/ maven-user-guide/ maven-reference-guide/ The new stuff here: - maven-user-guide is a site that contains documentation for Maven. It would have a lot of the stuff from the site now under /guides/, but is here to be versioned and distributed. It would be of type assembly and produce an zip of the docs for individual download. - maven-dist is of <packaging>assembly</packaging> and contains the assembly descriptors and binary files currently in maven-core. It would depend on maven-user-guide and bundle that in some binary distributions that include documentation (I generally prefer a separate bundle as above, but its an option as I'm thinking general practices here) - maven-reference-guide is a site that is deployed to include documentation for Maven developers. It depends on all the modules and while it doesn't produce a distribution, it provides the site that links in all the other modules and would produce any aggregate reports. The site plug-in would have to be able to include dependencies in a menu instead of modules, which might be a hassle as we are now reproducing a lot of information. This is the one I'm least comfortable about. Note that some of this content might be included in a user-guide (eg aggregated javadoc), so it needs to work there too. Any thoughts? It's obvious at this point the site inheritance needs a bit of rethought - most likely the site descriptor will need to have its own <parent> element for finding the parent site descriptor. Thanks, Brett --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
