Ability to introduce new lifecycles phases

I believe this was explained on the user list.

a) you can probably define your own lifecycle, but it is very much discouraged. It really hasn't even been tested.
b) you can create the distribution archives using assembly:attached. Multiple assemblies can be made in the latest version of the plugin
c) you can bind several instances of a plugin to a phase with executions and id's.

Brett,

I reopened this issue, because:

As long as I cannot use a plugin with one configuration per goal, I still have the need to have custom lifecycle phases. Nobody has ever mentioned how to do that. All I know how to do is to have one configuration per lifecycle phase, using the "execution" tag. So, it's either that which is described in (MJAVADOC-44) or additional lifecycle phase, otherwise I'm dead in the water and cannot move my projects to Maven 2. Solutions mentioned on the mailing lists don't resolve my issues, they just work for very simple use cases.

On a different note, I think you should really think about making the lifecycle more flexible. In Maven 1 this was so much more flexibile, and I would have introduced so many people to Maven, if it wasn't for lack of performance. I simply don't think that a build tool is supposed to impose a build lifecycle on a project. At least, converting it to a "New Feature" request would be appreciated.

Chris

Converting to a wish. I don't really like using JIRA for discussion, especially when it is unclear - please point me at a discussion on the users list and I'll try and pick it up. Unfortunately I don't read them all day to day.

Here is how you have multiple goal executions:

<plugin>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>first-run</id>
<configuration>
</configuration>
<goals>
<goal>...</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
<execution>
<id>second-run</id>
<configuration>
</configuration>
<goals>
<goal>...</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>

We are planning more flexible bindings in a later version of Maven (you can participate in the dev discussions if that helps - there is some info on the wiki being formed). However, the lifecycle itself is not intended to be modified.

It's worth noting that one of the largest weaknesses in Maven 1.x was the flexibility of the lifecycle that made it very brittle to plugin changes. If you start changing the order, then plugins will break as they are supposed to be able to expect the given order - so it is fixed. If it is just the insertion of more phases then other than above, it just means we've missed something and should insert the phase into the default.

(if we already have a design issue open for the 2.1 lifecycle, this one should be closed as a duplicate).

I have another use case which indicates that Maven needs more flexibility in the configuring lifecycles:

Problem: We need to do a couple of things which are not part of the "build" process. As an example, during the development phase engineers need to deploy the application on an application server every so often (e.g. to test bug fixes, etc.). But of course we don't want to perform such a "deployment" every time we create a release of the application.

Current workaround: We are using the "antrun" plugin to execute a target in ANT which performs the actual application deployment on the application server. However, by default the "antrun" plugin has a configuration per lifecycle phase, and a "global" configuration. As we don't want to tie the application deployment onto the app server to any lifecycle phase, we configure the antrun plugin using a "global" configuration:

...
<plugin>
<artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<tasks>
<ant antfile="$

/deploy.xml" inheritRefs="true">
<!-- specify properties for passing to deploy.xml-->
<property name="product.name" value="$

"/>
<property name="product.version" value="$

"/>
...
<target name="deploy"/>
....

It looks as if we can now simply execute mvn antrun:run to execute the task "deploy". However, this only works if we don't have multiple ANT targets to be exeucted for different purposes (e.g. "deploy" to deploy application on app server, "restart" to restart application server, etc.).

Expectation: I think it is a reasonable expectation that Maven is not only a simple (but powerful) build tool, but that it can be used for other tasks as well. Hence I think it should really be possible to define "custom" lifecycle phases, and that they may be plugged into the default lifecycle execution process. On my wishlist would even be that a user can define different lifecycles for different purposes (e.g. one lifecycle with x phases for building a release, one lifecycle for deploying the application on an app server, etc.)

P.S: I know that JIRA is not the best place to have discussions like this. Please indicate a better place (e.g. WIKI) if there is any.

Can I add my related issue to this one!
http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-2415

or this http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-2097 ?