About generic lifecycles

[Javier Vélez <ja...@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I am a new maven user. As I have understand from the documentation, maven
provides several extension mechanisms to adapt its use depending on project
types, organizational culture and so on. Thus,  I can create new plug-ins
with convenient goals to assist the manner in which my team undertake
software development process. In addition, archetypes can be defined as a
pattern driven approach to fast construction of new projects. This is an
amazing idea.



But, why lifecycles are fixed to 3 ones (build, site and clear)? I think it
would be very interesting if I could configure my pom to declare the
collection of new lifecycles that are to be used within a target project and
specify which phases and goals are executed. Thus, the 3 current fixed
lifecycles could be just one settings in the pom written by
archetype:generate goal.



As an example suppose I want to manage a project about compiler
construction. This case corresponds to a new archetype where specific phases
of development are used: 1) lexical specification 2) syntax specification 3)
semantic analysis 4) intermediate code generation and 5) code generation. I
need to define a compiler construction archetype and declare the
aforementioned 5 steps as phases in a fresh “compiler-lifecycle” lifecycle.



I would be very grateful If I could know community opinion about this issue.

Best regards, Javi.