Details
Major Description
Currently we use the test-custom and test-custom2 profiles in openjpa-persistence-jdbc/pom.xml to enable testing of a variety of databases. Basically anything that does not have a publicly available JDBC drivers.
This support works well if you run the build manually, but isn't always perfect when using a continuous build system.
In many continuous build systems you want to have a single build definition which can be run on any number of machines. Ideally each machine could store the database settings in ${user.home}/.m2/settings.xml. Where this becomes a problem is if a single machine wants to use our test-custom profile in conjuction with another one. For example mvn -Ptest-custom,test-custom-oracle clean install. In order to make this work Maven would have to set variables in test-custom-oracle and then read them in the test-custom profile. Ensuring that the properties are handled in the correct order is cumbersome and doesn't seem to work in recent versions of maven / surefire.
To resolve the problem I propose creating specific profiles for testing with various proprietary databases. These profiles rely on the user running mvn install:install-file ${maven args} to install a copy of the jdbc drivers in a local repository prior to running, but after that one time setup step it's a lot easier to run tests on various databases (manually or on a build system).