[ https://issues.jboss.org/browse/FORGE-440?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.... ] Lennart Jörelid commented on FORGE-440: --------------------------------------- Hello there, Lincoln. First off, [https://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-5488#comment-327349] could likely use a peek and a vote or 50000. (Go there, folks - and Vote!) ;) WRT the Forge side of things, I believe we have likely 2 ways to proceed: # Wait for a generally available comment property in all major maven model types. This could possibly take quite some time - maybe even to imply a release of Maven's Model version 5 if accepted by the Apache community. Thus ... impractical in the short term. # Accept that the Maven model is fundamentally flawed WRT comments, and create a datastructure and parser/joiner for it ourselves. This is also likely to be a non-trivial endeavour, but certainly doable. Therefore... h3. Potential approach to preserve XML comments in POMs The POM itself should hold all comments both before and after a Forge operation. Therefore, we should not need to save comment texts persistently in other places. Assuming that all POM comments occur *before* an XML element, we must: # Slurp up all text (verbatim!) between the end tag of the preceding POM element and the start of the current POM element. (We don't want to change developer's carefully crafted/formatted comments, ASCII-art or whatever). # We'll ignore patterns of the type [newline][whitespace][start XML element], since this is not a comment or significant whitespace. # For non-ignored patterns, find out the XPath + Element ID of the POM element immediately following the text we just slurped up. # Create a transient Map<String, String> relating XPath to Comment text. # When the dust settles following a Forge operation, try to find all elements which had a comment and re-insert the corresponding comment text before the start tag of the element found. Come to think of it, this is not a particularly over-complex task. I'll go for a dive in MavenFacetImpl source code - need to get a feel for it before voicing any recommendations or supplying a patch. I take comfort in that unit tests should be a lifesaver in this particular case. Attaching a screenshot to illustrate. -- This message is automatically generated by JIRA. If you think it was sent incorrectly, please contact your JIRA administrators For more information on JIRA, see: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira