[jira] Commented: (MNG-3110) Each plugin should have a help goal

["Dennis Lundberg (JIRA)" <ji...@codehaus.org>]

    [ http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-3110?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#action_102501 ] 

Dennis Lundberg commented on MNG-3110:
--------------------------------------

The maven-help-plugin will give you some assistance on this:
  mvn help:describe -Dplugin=dependency
  mvn help:describe -Dplugin=dependency -Dfull=true

That being said, I think that this is an important issue that we should look into.

I see two options here:

1. Implement something like this in the plugin-plugin.
  Pro: easy for the user - just run the help goal on the plugin you need help with, no messing around with parameters
  Con: requires a new version of every plugin to support it

2. Alter the help-plugin so that it can produce something in between the two examples above. Just a list of the mojos for a plugin, not each and every parameter as it leads to information overload
  Pro: work for all plugins right away
  Con: not as intuitive for the end user



> Each plugin should have a help goal
> -----------------------------------
>
>                 Key: MNG-3110
>                 URL: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-3110
>             Project: Maven 2
>          Issue Type: New Feature
>          Components: Documentation:  General, Plugins and Lifecycle
>            Reporter: Tobias Roeser
>
> Each maven plugin should have a help goal, to describe itself.
> Example:
> # mvn dependency:help
> Maven Dependency Plugin Version 2.0-alpha-2
> Goals:
>   dependency:copy takes a list of artifacts defined in the plugin configuration section and copies them to a specified location, renaming them or stripping the version if desired. This goal can resolve the artifacts from remote repositories if they don't exist in local.
>   dependency:copy-dependencies takes the list of project direct dependencies and optionally transitive dependencies and copies them to a specified location, stripping the version if desired. This goal can also be run from the command line.
>   dependency:unpack like copy but unpacks.
>   dependency:unpack-dependencies like copy-dependencies but unpacks.
>   dependency:resolve tells Maven to resolve all dependencies and displays the version.
>   dependency:sources tells Maven to resolve all dependencies and their source attachments, and displays the version.
>   dependency:resolve-plugins Tells Maven to resolve plugins and their dependencies.
>   dependency:go-offline tells Maven to resolve everything this project is dependent on (dependencies, plugins, reports) in preparation for going offline.
>   dependency:purge-local-repository tells Maven to clear all dependency-artifact files out of the local repository, and optionally re-resolve them.
>   dependency:build-classpath tells Maven to output the path of the dependencies from the local repository in a classpath format to be used in java -cp
>   dependency:analyze analyzes your project's dependencies and lists dependencies that should be declared, but are not, and dependencies that are declared but unused.
>   dependency:analyze-dep-mgt analyzes your projects dependencies and lists mismatches between resolved dependencies and those listed in your dependencyManagement section.
> dependency:tree prints out the dependency tree for the project.
> It would be relatively easy to automatically generate a list of supported goals for each plugin. Not knowing, which goals a plugin supports and always beeing forced to find a web site online (which will often be out of date) is very annoying and not state of the art. E.g. Subversion is self descriptive.

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