Mavne Assembly Plugin Defect and Enhancement

[Sejal Patel <se...@gmail.com>]

Hey guys, I was looking to do a few things with the assembly plugin and so I
siffed through the code and notice a few things. I couldn't find any
developers listed on the assembly plugin page so I ask here (and I'm more
then happy to make the changes myself if needed).

1) org.apache.maven.plugin.assembly.archive.task.AddFileSetsTask line 76 is
a NullPointerException spot (which bit me when I tried to make a new plugin
that extended the current abstract one). Line 78 checks if project is null
and retrieves the project. However, line 76 uses the project before the
check/assignment is done. Recommend moving line 76 to be after the line 78
check.

2) Assembly requires too much boilerplate right now to be used in a reactor
based project because of the way it fails out if no descriptors are found. I
suggest adding a boolean parameter (probably ignoreMissingDescriptors) which
can default to false for backwards compatability but when set to true, does
nothing if no descriptors are found.

Then in org.apache.maven.plugin.assembly.io.DefaultAssemblyReader line 131
add the check for that new parameter so that it only fails out if it was
configured to fail out. Otherwise it just goes about its business of
assembly nothing (which seems like a perfectly reasonable logic as well).

By doing these things, it makes it possible to configure the assembly plugin
1 time in a parent pom and then not have to configure it in several (in my
case 11 out of 19) different modules again and again.

Please let me know if there are questions, concerns, or if you just want me
to do 1 or both of the things mentioned above myself instead (but will need
to learn how to become a commiter).

Thanks

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