Site generation issues

[Julien Stern <ju...@cryptolog.com>]

Hi list,

Sorry for the long mail. Please take it as a user feedback more
than a rant despite the fact I'll talk about what does NOT work
and not about what works :)

I've now been playing around with Maven2 for some time, and while
it is a fantastic tool for building, I still do not manage to use
it properly for site generation.

The main thing I do not understand is why plugins inside the
<reporting> section are not treated like plugins in the <build> section.

As a matter of fact, in the <reporting> section:

i) there is no equivalent of <pluginManagement> (and the
pluginManagement section does not seem to apply).

ii) there is no merge/inheritance, that is, there is only simple
inheritance when the plugin is not even mentionned again in the child
POM. However, unlike the build section, it is not possible to
only redefine parts of a plugin section in the child pom.

iii) there is no plugin dependencies and there is no <extensions>
section. It would seem that contrary to what is said on this page:
http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-checkstyle-plugin/examples/custom-developed-checkstyle.html
the <extensions> defined in the build are not made available to
plugins defined in the reporting section (I tried the example,
it did not work for me).

iv) it is not possible to fine tune the execution order of plugins
by phase in a way similar to plugins in the <build> section, causing
problems with plugins such as QAlab.

This makes the reporting section extremely hard to use, if not
impossible in some cases. Actually, it seems that many people
start to invoke the reporting plugins in the build phase to overcome
all the limitations above, and re-invoke them during the reporting
phase only to get the links to the reports in the web page, hoping
that the second invocation will realize work has already been done.

So, I'd be interested to know where the reporting is heading to.
Are there any reasons not to treat the <reporting> plugins exactly the
same way as <build> plugins?
Are there plans to overcome the above limitations?

In the meantime, (I've using 2.0.7), are there any tricks that could
help me solve these reporting plugins problems? So far, the only
solution I found in many cases is to invoke them in the <build>, and
manually add the links to their generated web pages in the site.xml
file, which is not exactly great...

Regards,

--
Julien

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