Deploying and resolving compressed artifacts

[Shahim Essaid <sh...@essaid.com>]

Hi all,

I posted a question on the Aether mailing list [1] but this list might be a
better place for my question.

I would like to use Maven (with custom extensions) as a tool for building
OWL ontologies and treat the ontologies as Maven artifacts. The ontologies
are usually XML files but they can be considered as artifacts with
coordinates and it would be very useful to host them in Maven repositories.
One issue is that the files can be very large but still compress well and
it would make sense to deploy compressed versions of the large files.

My question is whether or not (with some Maven/Aether extensions) it is
possible to make the form of the artifact in the repository (i.e.
compressed or not) be transparent to the Maven build process. Artifact
resolution/deployment, and possibly the metadata, will obviously need some
extensions but once the artifact is resolved, the rest of the build should
see the standard uncompressed form of the artifact. Not sure if I am
describing this well so please feel free to ask for clarifications.

I know that I can use classifiers and other parameters to add secondary
artifacts but this is not exactly what I need. What I am trying to do is to
have the primary artifact's coordinates possibly resolve to a compressed
form if the standard form is not available in the repository and any POM
dependencies should work with either form of the artifact.

Does Maven API allow me to implement something like this? Also, as far as I
can tell there are no plugins that already do this but I might be wrong.

[1] http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/aether-users/msg00426.html

Thanks,
Shahim