Hello Maven friends,
I have some questions about the Maven plugin system which require a bit of context, please bear with me for a minute.
I have recently written a Java code generator which meanwhile is self-hosting, that is: part of the code generator's code is generated by itself. This makes the project quiet special in that it is self-dependent.
That's not a bug, but actually a feature - the recent switch to self-generated code simplified the sources considerably, removing redundancies - thus making it more maintainable - and, as a welcome side effect, making the system a test case for itself.
Self-dependency implies that in order to build the generator, the generator must already exist, a dilemma which I solve like everyone else by providing binaries. Since it's Java and the binary is quiet small I can just include a precompiled .jar in the source code distribution for use during the build. That's fine and all.
I also wrote an Ant task for the code generator, and again I'm using it "recursively" in the script used for building the system, including the Ant task itself. That's possible because Ant provides the <taskdef/> mechanism for adding a Task on-the-fly (loading it from the precompiled .jar) before the task is "officially" built and installed.
Now, I plan to create a Maven plugin next and switch to Maven for building, and I want to again "recursively" use this Maven plugin for building "itself" - that is, the system including the Maven plugin. Everything else would mean redundancy.
My problem is that I can't figure out how to add the precompiled plugin to Maven on-the-fly, at build time - before the freshly compiled plugin gets installed.
I noticed the maven.plugin.dir property, but since I need other plugins as well and this is a ".dir" and not a ".path", I don't want to tinker with it.
I would also like to avoid XML inclusion hacks (like "symlinking" the plugin's goals into maven.xml) but instead go with a standard Maven plugin, just as I go with a standard Ant task now.
In addition, I'd dislike any approach that involves temporarily installing the plugin outside of the build directory (the Maven developer guide mentions something about copying the plugin tree during development.) A build process is not supposed to modify the system environment after all, even if it's a temporary change.
So my question would be, is there any other way to register the precompiled plugin with Maven temporarily? Perhaps some Java method I could call using Jelly, announcing the temporary root of the not-yet-installed plugin, and ideally allowing me to set its classpath to the precompiled .jar as well?
In general, what do Maven experts think: is the Maven architecture prepared for self-dependent projects like this, or should I better stick to the lower-level approach, Ant, for this particular kind of project?
Thanks for your time and consideration,
Julian
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