maven/maven-core/plugin-notes.txt

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This here is a clear example of some nastiness that has crept into Maven and here
is where it will be cleaned up. This plugin is specific to running tests with
surefire but it may well be a test runner for something else requiring a
different set of resources. The surefire plugin's concern is to run surefire
tests and to do that it must:

o compile the test sources
o copy over the test resources
o run sure fire

So currently below there are prereqs for the test:compile and test:resources
but it is entirely unclear what those things are doing without looking
at the other plugins which is not scalable. If surefire needed to add
foo.jar and bar.jar to the classpath for compiling there would be some
serious nastiness going on in order to modify the parameters of the compile.

So, the surefire plugin should use the other plugins to satisfy its requirements
and by using the plugins directly it can control their use for the specific
purpose of running surefire tests.

A goal is essentially a sequence of plugin executions that have been parameterized for
a specific task.

<plugin>
  <id>compiler</id>
  <configuration>
    <sourceDirectory>#project.build.unitTestSourceDirectory</sourceDirectory>
    <outputDirectory>#maven.test.dest</outputDirectory>
    <classpathElements>#project.classpathElements</classpathElements>
    <compiler>javac</compiler>
  </configuration>
</plugin>
<plugin>
  <id>resource-copier</id>
  <configuration>
    <outputDirectory>#maven.test.dest</outputDirectory>
    <resources>#project.build.unitTest.resources</resources>
  </configuration>
</plugin>
<plugin>
  <id>surefire</id>
  <configuration>
    <mavenRepoLocal>#localRepository</mavenRepoLocal>
    <basedir>#basedir</basedir>
    <includes>#project.build.unitTest.includes</includes>
    <excludes>#project.build.unitTest.excludes</excludes>
    <classpathElements>#project.classpathElements</classpathElements>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

If say for example you used DbUnit or XMLUnit then the configurations for
each of the plugin executions would be different.

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