Hi all, I posted a question on the Aether mailing list [1] but this list might be a better place for my question.
I would like to use Maven (with custom extensions) as a tool for building OWL ontologies and treat the ontologies as Maven artifacts. The ontologies are usually XML files but they can be considered as artifacts with coordinates and it would be very useful to host them in Maven repositories. One issue is that the files can be very large but still compress well and it would make sense to deploy compressed versions of the large files. My question is whether or not (with some Maven/Aether extensions) it is possible to make the form of the artifact in the repository (i.e. compressed or not) be transparent to the Maven build process. Artifact resolution/deployment, and possibly the metadata, will obviously need some extensions but once the artifact is resolved, the rest of the build should see the standard uncompressed form of the artifact. Not sure if I am describing this well so please feel free to ask for clarifications. I know that I can use classifiers and other parameters to add secondary artifacts but this is not exactly what I need. What I am trying to do is to have the primary artifact's coordinates possibly resolve to a compressed form if the standard form is not available in the repository and any POM dependencies should work with either form of the artifact. Does Maven API allow me to implement something like this? Also, as far as I can tell there are no plugins that already do this but I might be wrong. [1] http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/aether-users/msg00426.html Thanks, Shahim
