--also-make-phase

Background: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/maven-dev/201104.mbox/%3Cincnbn$4kl$1@dough.gmane.org%3E

-also-make (with -projects) is useful, but suffers from the problem that dependent projects are always built to the same goal/phase as the selected project(s). That is fine for e.g. compile or install, but not for e.g. test where you would only want to build compile (or test-compile) for dependencies, not actually test them.

Suggest a variant form of this parameter (say -also-make-phase / -amp) which would accept a goal or phase to run on dependencies in place of the regular arguments. For example, to run a unit test after making sure all its dependencies have been (re)compiled:

mvn -amp test-compile -pl testedmod test -Dtest=OneTest

or to run an (unpacked) web application after (re-)compiling libraries it uses:

mvn -amp compile -pl webapp jetty:run

You might want to pass a goal rather than a phase, so the name could be misleading, but I think that would be a rarer use case. Ditto passing multiple goals/phases for the upstream projects.