It is almost impossible to remember the usage of the helper utility plugins in maven. Every single time I have problems with transient dependencies I end up searching google for "maven help plugin" and "maven dependency plugin". That is not good enough.
The help plugin should have a goal called help, describing the usage of the plugin. This would make help (or, rather, a bootstrap on how to use the help system) available under the obvious command "mvn help:help". This goal could also hint about the existence of the dependency plugin, since many of the difficult problems when using maven are related to complex transitive dependencies.
The command "mvn -help" should also describe the use of the maven-help-plugin, but I will create a separate issue in the maven core module for that.
Improvement
Closed
Major
New goal help:help to provide help on how to use helper plugins in maven
I completely agree with Eirik that the help plugin is too difficult to use. I'd like to venture a bit further; I think the goal shouldn't be any less than the ability to run
Where plugins from both org.apache.maven.plugins and org.codehaus.mojo should be accepted without specifying groupId. I suspect that this can be implemented in a fairly clean manner by introducing a help lifecycle; a launcher tweak may be required to infer -Dplugin= for the second parameter. I think that's an acceptable price to pay.
I also agree with Andrea's comment in
). The -Dfull=true parameter can remain supported in its current form.
MPH-15that the -Dfull=true output is a bit verbose, and I think the normal output is too terse. I think the correct level of default verbosity would be to render a console version of the first three sections (intro, required parameters, optional parameters) of the "xxxxx-mojo.html" pages in any plugin site (e.g.Finally, an outputXML parameter as seen in the analysis mojos of the maven-dependency-plugin would be invaluable.