I hesitate to bring it up, but this seems as good a time as any. You've mentioned several times your intent to massage the Xalan Maven build to produce artifacts at parity with the existing Ant build, and not just the contents of artifacts but also where they end up in the directory structure, for the convenience of those who are used to the Ant build.
I foresee that if you are truly successful in this goal, you will have thoroughly reimplemented a procedural Ant build, and created a very weird Maven build, to the point where you may exclaim 'why did I even start this? It took so much work to get Maven to do what I was doing easily in Ant!', and Maven users will be confused about why there's nothing they expected in the target directory after running compile. There's something to be said for embracing the Maven Way [1], and if you want to keep both builds in sync for a time, perhaps the effort would be better spent in updating the Ant build to put things in the places Maven puts them by default. [1]: https://maven.apache.org/background/philosophy-of-maven.html
