Document usage of negation symbol for profile activation (undocumented feature)
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Key: MNGSITE-86
URL: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNGSITE-86
Project: Maven 2 Project Web Site
Issue Type: Task
Environment: *
Reporter: Thorsten Möller
Please, document that the negation symbol "!" can be used for profile
activation not only to test the absence of a property. This is currently not
documented on this page:
http://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-profiles.html
This request goes back to a thread on the Maven user list, cf.
http://www.nabble.com/Undocumented-Feature%3A-Usage-of-negation-for-profile-activation-td23446509.html
In the following I basically quote the original message posted to the forum;
with some extensions to the example. The example can be almost directly added
to the page to document and illustrate how this feature can be used:
Hello,
I just found a---to my best knowledge---undocumented feature and thought I
should share it with the community in the hope that it will made its way into
the Maven documentation.
The feature is that you can use the negation symbol "!" within a profile
activation specifification not only to test the absence of a property but also
within the <os> tag, for instance, to express something like "activate the
profile if the OS family name is _not_ xyz". The following example illustrates
this:
<profiles>
<profile>
<id>tools-jar-windows</id>
<activation>
<os>
<family>windows</family>
</os>
</activation>
<properties>
<toolsJAR>${java.home}/../lib/tools.jar</toolsJAR>
</properties>
</profile>
<profile>
<id>tools-jar-unix</id>
<activation>
<os>
<!-- We need to exclude Mac OS X since it is in
family 'unix' -->
<family>unix</family>
<name>!mac os x</name>
</os>
</activation>
<properties>
<toolsJAR>${java.home}/../lib/tools.jar</toolsJAR>
</properties>
</profile>
<profile><!-- Mac OSX Java JDK doesn't has separate tools.jar. -->
<id>tools-jar-mac</id>
<activation>
<os>
<!-- We can not only use 'family' discriminator
since Mac also has 'family = unix' -->
<family>unix</family>
<name>mac os x</name>
</os>
</activation>
<properties>
<toolsJAR>${java.home}/../Classes/classes.jar</toolsJAR>
</properties>
</profile>
<profiles>
So in this example I use <name>!mac os x</name> to specify that the profile
<id>tools-jar-unix</id> should be applied to all UNIX family operating systems
_except_ Mac OS X.
This example was tested with Maven 2.0.9, 2.0.10, 2.1.0 on Windows XP, Linux
(Ubuntu 8.10), and Mac OS X 10.5.6 and it works for all of them. Nice :-)
Cheers,
Thorsten
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