[jboss-dev] Rebuilding thirdparty jars with maven

[Paul Gier]

There was some discussion recently on the Maven mailing list about synchronizing 
artifacts between the jboss maven repository and the central maven repository 
[1].  One of the main issues is how can we synchronize with the central 
repository when we have rebuilt thirdparty artifacts that use the same groupId 
and artifactId.

Currently, we publish rebuilt artifacts with a modified version number like 
"1.1-brew", and then just update the POMs to point to that version.  This 
(usually) works nicely because Maven automatically excludes transitive 
dependencies on other versions of this jar.  But we can't push this back to the 
central maven repository with the same groupId because it didn't come from the 
upstream project.  So the recommendation of some Maven developers is to change 
the groupId (possibly prefix it with org.jboss for rebuilt thirdparty jars).

This would be a good practice for us except for the fact that Maven's dependency 
management does not currently have a way to link together two groupId/artifactId 
combinations to say that these are two versions of the same artifact.  And that 
would mean more even effort to exclude dependencies.  But it might be our only 
choice if we want to automatically sync with the central repository in the future.

[1] http://www.nabble.com/Depending-on-Artifacts-not-in-central-td24394458.html