Hello all,

I recently contributed to the forge project (FORGE-842) by adding the pluginManagement support to the mavenPluginFacet.

One question is still opened, which is the purpose of this post.

Basically, it is about a smart plugin resolution, ie having the plugin properties (artifactId, groupId, version,...) automatically resolved when a plugin is defined in a "pluginManagement" section and used in a "plugins" section.

Let's take the following example:

<build>
    <pluginManagement>
      <plugins>
        <plugin>
	        <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
	        <version>2.0.2</version>
	        <configuration>
	          <source>1.6</source>
	          <target>1.6</target>
	        </configuration>
	    </plugin>
      </plugins>
    </pluginManagement>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

Currently, a call to the

mavenPluginFacet.getPlugin(DependencyBuilder.create("org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-compiler-plugin")).getVersion()

will return a null value, because the version is not declared in the "//build/plugins/plugin" section.

Maven will, however, resolve the plugin by using the version and configuration of the maven-compiler-plugin declared in the "//build/pluginManagement/plugins" section.

Moreover, we should also note that the pluginManagement section will be, most of the time, declared in the parent pom, which makes the smart resolution as follow:

1. Compute the effective pom

2. Resolve the plugin properties

My question is: based on the fact that similar implementation was done with Dependency and DependencyManagement sections (in the MavenDependencyFacet and DependencyInstaller), which methods should be implemented ?

Following the same logic, we could also thing of a smart "addPlugin" method: what if I add a plugin that is already managed, with the same version of the managed plugin ? With some configuration element(s) being the same as the managed plugin ? ...

Based on your answers, I will create a FORGE issue and will try to implement the missing methods.

Thanks,

Charles.