I was going to create a new MNG issue but thought I'd start here first: managing large XML documents is no fun and long POM definitions with many dependencies are subject to this. I saw a thread from 2007 that Eric Redmond linked to regarding a YAML -> XML program ( http://markmail.org/message/5eiwzf5dgnb2hhjj#query:maven%20yaml+page:1+mid:jqspgciwwbzmvsvq+state:results), but I wanted to investigate if there is any interest in building this directly into Maven(/Modello) so that if pom.xml doesn't exist, next up would be pom.yml (or pom.properties or the like, anything less verbose than XML). An acquaintance of mine also suggested it might be nice to have a Groovy/BeanShell/other file that's passed an empty Model object to populate so that, for example, profiles could be triggered by other/non-standard means, as well as listing dependencies and anything else in the POM. That would give some dynamic programming flexibility to construct the POM along with a relatively compact file format even for static definitions.
After browsing the Maven source code it looks to me like the best way to do this is to create a YAML plugin for Modello, then somehow glue that into the core Maven code. I don't have any prior experience developing either one (though I am a developer), but as I have time I can look at it and experiment with it. Any code tips on how I might do this as a contribution would be welcomed, as well as any reasons why I should *not* do this or why this would not be a desirable change. If there is enough interest and people think it's an idea worth pursuing, I'll jump on IRC to try to get a jump start. Thank you, Nat Harward
