> An automatic solution would be good, but I don't see a problem with having
> a manual step. Hey, there are lots of manual steps in the release process
> already.
>
> Well, I do not think it makes sense to add additional manual steps by
> concept.
>
You're right. But I see so many advantages to get this in place earlier than
later that I'd argue that yet another manual step is ok. That manual step
should be simple though, not creating a ton of files, logging into several
systems, etc.
> How about extending the site:deploy goal? It should not be too difficult to
> add the ${project.version} as a directory to the path the site gets deployed
> to. What would be missing is an index.html which simply redirects to the
> current version using http headers. But the generation of said index.html
> should be trivial.
> I do not think that symlinking is a way to get to the current version. Both
> because following symlinks isn't necessarily allowed on a given target
> server and symlinking simply does not work on any operating system.
>
> What troubles me at the moment is how to link from the current version to
> the older versions. Maybe this could be done via a special report plugin?
> What would be left is a) extending the site plugin with a special goal like
> site:deploy-versioned and b) a report plugin which examines the deployment
> site and adds the older versions to the site. Probably a) and b) could be
> combined to a new plugin?
>
If we want this in the site plugin we should probably work together with the
Apache Maven team. I know several of you are here as well so you could
possibly handle that bridging?
Btw, I think that the Apache Maven plugins do get staged in a separate place
and if you know the (secret/not official) url you can view older versions of
the plugins' sites as well (as they are kept).
This might not be a good idea, but I'll through it into the discussion
anyways: What about using the maven-site repo feature of the Nexus instance?
I've already filed a ticket for getting staging support for maven sites in
Nexus and if we could get enough attention we might be able to get that
implemented. That together with a Nexus plugin, that would auto-generated
the index page listing all available maven site versions (or doing the
"symlinking"). Just brainstorming here...
/Anders
