maven/USE-CASES.txt

Trying to get a large set of use cases that we can use to help drive
development in the right direction. I would like to collect some here and then
post them to the wiki as examples users can template to express what their
use cases are. So my first example is something I chatted about with Aslak
this morning. So they are brief and possibly naive but a huge collection
of these would help I think.

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- Being able to write artifact handler that would operate to install an
xdoclet plugin correctly when an xdoclet plugin is stated as a dependency.

- With Maven installed it should be a simple command that allows you to
checkout the sources for a project.

- Unified source directory structure that is analagous to the repository
itself. This way locations of intermediary artifacts of a build would be
in a known location.  This would also help with developer setup i.e. getting
new developers up and running. They could run a maven command and have all
their source trees set up in the same way as their collegues.

- I would like to be able to execute some goals (like 'clean') even when  
  not all dependencies are satisfied

- Support for transitive and group dependencies

- It should be easy to create a single report without a need to (call like it has place now)
  maven:site. It will be nice if report generators can produce docs in few diffrent formats
  (e.g pdf, html, rtf) and this format can be also choosen for group of reports.
  
- groupId
 - Let's assume that there exists an artifact type "web-component" 
   which is a zip file containg css/js/gifs/jpegs etc
   Example of such artifact is for example distribution of tigris style.
   
   Say an user has declared the following dependency:

   <depenedency>
      <groupId>org.tigris</groupId>
      <artifactId>style</artifactId>
      <type>web-component</type>
      <version>2.0</version>
   </depenedency>
   
   A dependency of this type should be processed only when users assembles the web application
   (war:webapp goal in maven-old)
   
   In short:  user can be able to declare goal decorators and goals should be fine-grained 
   

- Maven is Java Build Tool. It should be well defined what does it mean to "build java project".
  It means that stages of the process should be well defined.
  
  pre-compile (this is when tools like JAXB, XDoclet)
  compile (javac, aspectj)
  post-compile (aspectj? ) 
  pre-jar
  ...
  etc
  
  It should e.g be possible to use Castor, JAXB plugin, XDoclet plugin without writing a single line  
  of build script. In the ideal case it should be just enough to plug-in XDoclet into process simply 
  by "checking the checkbox in IDE". 
  This is someting what Vincent Massol started in maven-caller plugin. It will be nice to explore this idea. 
   
- Reorganization of repository layout - are we going to map groupId : "a.b.c.d"  to path "a/b/c/d"?
  Are there some better alternatives?
  
- (Michal)  I have tried to implement "platform dependend dependecies".
   
   <depenedency>
      <groupId>a</groupId>
      <artifactId>b</artifactId>
      <type>native</type>
      <version>2.0</version>
   </depenedency> 
    
    is resolved as 
    
   a/b-2.0.dll (on windows) or a/b-2.0.so (unix)
   
   
   Maybe it can/should be done differently? 
   What other "platform depended" artifact type do we have?
   exe? shell-script?
     
   
 - how to declare a dependency on JDK and what are possible implications of such dependency
  (e.g javac/javadoc target jdk)