enable internal/external dependency references as links

this patch needs more work

• must be 1.4 compatible
• no need to reresolve the projects, the javadoc plugin already does, maybe you need to add a variable with the artifacts like compiler plugin does to build the classpath so they are available later

i know it is not the best solution but i needed a solution fast, any volunteers on beatifying this "nessesary" feature.

maybe somewone can comine the effort with the xref generation, to solve the same problem for both projects

Here's another, much more concise patch that I'm fairly sure accomplishes the same thing.

Matthew, this code is using the project's url as the maven site. However, there are some cases where the project site is different from the generated maven site.
So I changed the code to use the distributionManagement site. If the project doesn't have one, them attempts to use the project's website.
Here's the code:
@2575
if (model != null)
{
String site;
if(model.getDistributionManagement()!=null && model.getDistributionManagement().getSite() !=null)

else if(model.getUrl() != null)
site = model.getUrl(); //attempts to use the project's url.

addArgIfNotEmpty(arguments, "-link", JavadocUtil
.quotedPathArgument(site + "/apidocs"),
true); //TODO: fix the getUrl() method to return the URL with the version.
}

I'm using the substring since there's another protocol (dav being used for uploading the website. Maybe there's a better solution for that.

Note that these patches won't work with dependencies that doesn't follow maven conventions for the site (for instance, hibernate uses http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/v3/api/ ).

I specifically avoided that approach, since it assumes a) that the project is using WebDAV to deploy the site, and b) that the publishing URL is the same as the public access URL. Those both seem like very large assumptions; larger, in my view, than the assumption about the <url> field...

Since it is highly unlikely that POM will ever have a javadoc location in the future <http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-2198> (although this feature would have made a good use of it) I suggest that URL resolving is made pluggable with either of the suggested methods as default. Manual listing of link/linkoffline becomes quite tedious and break easily

Fixed in r795801

I added two new parameters: detectLinks and detectOfflineLinks
Using detectlinks parameter, it tries to add dependencies Javadoc links, ie if you have

<dependency>
   <groupId>commons-lang</groupId>
   <artifactId>commons-lang</artifactId>
 </dependency>

The added Javadoc link will be http://commons.apache.org/lang/apidocs.

Using detectOfflineLinks, all modules javadoc dirs are added as offlinelinks.