Dependencies, extensions, and related issues

[Simone Zorzetti <al...@virgilio.it>]

I've been looking at Maven for same time, and finally last month I've 
adopted it as
comprehensive build tool for my team (migrating from ant).
I joined the mailing list because I'd like to get involved in this project.

While studying the source code of the project I developed a couple of ideas:

1 The mapping between an artifact type and its extension should be a 1 to 
many relation
for example:
type jar extensions jar,zip
type distribution extensions zip,gz,tar.gz

Regarding this I found an interesting issue
http://jira.codehaus.org/ViewIssue.jspa?key=MAVEN-670

the actual mapping may be resolved runtime looking up the various repositories
and picking up the first match. This would solve the above issue and open up a
lot of other possibilities:  dependencies from images or documents of various
kind, etc.

For this thing I wrote a patch from the MAVEN_RC1_STABLE branch (attached)


2 I think that a Dependency object should really be able to download itself