[MNG-7556] Clean up notion between user properties and system properties

• Type: Task
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 3.9.0, 4.0.0-alpha-3, 4.0.0
• Assignee: Michael Osipov
• Reporter: Michael Osipov
• Created: 03/Oct/22 18:06
• Updated: 22/Sep/23 11:28
• Resolved: 29/Oct/22 18:45

Description

For a very long time we have documented that the user can set system properties via mvn -Dfoo=bar, but actually those are user properties which are promoted to system properties and it some cases system properties cannot be modified after the JVM has been started. To properly set system properties there are basically two ways:

• use MAVEN_OPTS environment variable
• use .mvn/jvm.config file

A third option in the future we could introduce, like other Java tools, a -J-Dfoo=bar option with the restriction of the the paragraph above.

Issue Links

• causes: MNG-7887 cannot inject ci-friendly revision/sha1/changelist properties via MAVEN_OPTS
• is related to: MSHARED-1132 Improved handling of system and user properties
• relates to: MNG-7782 System properties are no longer overridden with user properties with the same name
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #810