[KARAF-165] A better 'feature-assembly' plugin

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: 2.1.0
• Assignee: Adrian Trenaman
• Reporter: Adrian Trenaman
• Created: 25/Aug/10 17:42
• Updated: 08/Dec/10 10:16

Description

Create an improved Maven feature-assembly plugin. Right now, to make a feature I've got to add almost a hundred lines of Maven verbage to my pom.xml in order to assemble a feature. I've got to use the attach-artifact goal of the org.codehaus.mojo/build-helper-maven-plugin to deploy my features file into Maven. I've got to use the add-features-to-repo goal from the org.apache.karaf.tooling/features-maven-plugin to suck down all the dependent bundles. I've got to a whole load of other stuff to perform the packaging to .tar.gz and .zip. The problem here is that I'm using a whole load of generic plugins to do a very specific job, and I'm having to tell the plugins what to do instead of telling them what I want done. I'd prefer to have a single more declarative plugin to do this. It might look like this:

			<plugin>
				<groupId>org.apache.karaf.tooling</groupId>
				<artifactId>feature-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
				<version>2.2.0</version>
				<executions>
					<execution>
						<id>create-repo</id>
						<phase>generate-resources</phase>
						<goals>
							<goal>create-repo</goal>
						</goals>
						<configuration>
							<!-- Specify the feature file to use. -->
							<featureFile>file:${basedir}/target/classes/features.xml</featureFile>
	
							<!-- Specify what features to include. This is actually optional: if no features
								are specified, then include all features in the file by default. --> 
							<features>
								<feature>feature-a</feature>
							</features>
						</configuration>
					</execution>
				</executions>
			</plugin>

The plugin should produce a .tar.gz and .zip file, containing the feature descriptor (and all dependent descriptors) and all bundles (and dependent bundles)in a Maven-style directory, similar to the system/ directory currently used in Karaf. Note that this plugin doesn't need you to list out all the feature repositories / descriptors that your feature file may transitively include - it will detect these dependencies at runtime and work out the details.