I've run into a problem of how my IDE treats the javadoc secondary Apache POI
artifact. (v3.12)
I've tracked the problem to being the fact that the Apache POI project - as the
only project I've ever encountered - publish their javadoc artifacts using
plural spelling, i.e. "javadocs" rather than "javadoc". As far as I can tell
this is the source of problems with IDEs.
Let us revisit: The classifier string in Maven is just an arbitrary string.
Strictly speaking the Apache POI project is not violating any rules by using
plural spelling here. It just happens to be the contrary of what everyone else
does. Just for comparison (I was afraid I was going mad) I checked two other
major Java projects, namely Netty and Apache Commons IO. They both do the
singular spelling ("javadoc"). The Apache POM reference does indeed mention
that the classifier is most often used for things like javadoc and sources and
goes onto to saying that "...you will notice that the classifiers sources and
javadoc are used to deploy the project source code and API docs along with the
packaged class files.". Sure this is a convention, not a must. Still.
I'm curious how this could ever happen? If one uses the Maven Javadoc plugin
then I'm sure it will use the classifier name "javadoc" by default when
creating the javadoc artifact.
Anyway, just wanted to know if I'm completely on the wrong track here or if I
should file a bug ticket ??
Peter
