What is the best way to deal with third party libraries that are not released as maven 2 projects? I know about the install and deploy plug-ins, but I am worried about dependency management. A lot of the third party libraries we use have the following problems:
1) Some of the library's dependencies are only needed for specific functionality (ie a db library only needs the postgres jars when used with postgres) 2) The library is distributed with unversioned jars 3) The library is distributed with nightly or dev build jars So far, our solution has been to create a custom pom with all the dependencies marked as optional dependencies. This negates the benefit of transitive dependencies, but since these are third party libraries it is very hard for us to tell what is truly required. At least with optional dependencies, the pom file itself contains clues about the dependencies. For unversioned and nightly or dev build jars, we have been adding them with the groupId of the third party library and appending the name and version of the third party library to the dependency. Does this sound like a good solution or does anybody have a better one? We are trying to avoid losing the original jars distributed with the library. Thanks, Joon Chuah
