Artifact with different sets of dependencies switched by profiles

[Christofer Dutz]

Hi,

I am currently working on making the Apache Flex project able to release as 
Maven artifacts. For that I have created a tool that mavenizes a Flex SDK by 
generating poms and copying and renaming the libraries it consists of. All is 
working nicely. In contrast to Java in Flex you can sort of choose to use 
static linking (default) or dynamic linking (rsl). In Flexmojos this is 
controlled by having a maven scope of "rsl" for dynamically linked libraries.

Static linking:
                <dependency>
                    <groupId>org.apache.flex.framework</groupId>
                    <artifactId>spark</artifactId>
                    <version>4.12.1.20140427</version>
                    <type>swc</type>
                </dependency>

Dynamic linking:
                <dependency>
                    <groupId>org.apache.flex.framework</groupId>
                    <artifactId>spark</artifactId>
                    <version>4.12.1.20140427</version>
                    <type>swc</type>
                    <scope>rsl</scope>
                </dependency>

Now I wanted to make it easier for people using Flex so I generated two 
profiles in my poms. The default one active by default using static linking and 
one "flex-rsl" using dynamic linking wherever possible.
I was thinking of enabling that second profile by setting a property:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0";>
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

    <groupId>org.apache.flex</groupId>
    <artifactId>framework</artifactId>
    <version>4.12.1.20140427</version>
    <packaging>pom</packaging>

    <profiles>
        <profile>
            <id>default</id>

            <activation>
                <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
            </activation>

            <dependencies>

                ... A lot of dependencies ...

            </dependencies>
        </profile>

        <profile>
            <id>flex-rsl</id>

            <activation>
                <property>
                    <name>flex.framework.scope</name>
                    <value>rsl</value>
                </property>
            </activation>

            <dependencies>

                ... A lot of dependencies ...

            </dependencies>
        </profile>
    </profiles>
</project>

Now I tried activating that second profile by setting that property in the 
module referencing that pom artifact:

<properties>
        <flex.version>4.12.1.20140427</flex.version>
        <!-- Turn on rsl linking of swc dependencies -->
        <flex.framework.scope>rsl</flex.framework.scope>
</properties>

<dependencies>
                <dependency>
                    <groupId>org.apache.flex</groupId>
                    <artifactId>framework</artifactId>
                    <version>${flex.version}</version>
                    <type>pom</type>
                </dependency>
</dependencies>

But it seems this doesn't work ... so my question is ... is it possible to do 
what I want? If not ... is there a way I could achieve this? After all it seems 
classifiers for pom modules don't seem to exist.
Or am I wrong here and I could simply generate several pom files 
"framework-4.12.1.20140427.pom" and "framework-4.12.1.20140427-rsl.pom"?

Chris