Overview
This guide will walk you through
- downloading the latest source code from the trunk of a plugin
- building the plugin
- creating JIRA issues
- modifying the plugin source code
- deploying the plugin to an internal repository for use within your company
- creating patches and attaching to JIRA
- applying patches retrieved from JIRA
Downloading the latest source code from the trunk of a plugin
Maven uses Subversion as it's source control repository. The base subversion repository is located at http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/maven. Within this structure there are a number of different directories of useful files:
- http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/maven/plugins/trunk - all maven plugins
- http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/maven/sandbox/plugins - sandboxed maven plugins (ones that have not been promoted into common use)
- http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/maven/components/trunk - the maven core itself
- codehaus plugins - see their respective web pages for their location, the general format is svn.codehaus.org/project/trunk
Using your favourite subversion tool, check out the plugin you want (e.g. http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/maven/plugins/trunk/maven-assembly-plugin)
Building the plugin
The trunk should always build via mvn package.
However because the plugin may be using snapshot versions of other plugins, you will need to ensure you have setup your environment correctly to obtain any dependencies from the snapshot repositories. See the Maven Development Procedures for more details on how to configure your environment. You may also want to read Guide to Testing Development Versions of Plugin and
Guide to Plugin Snapshot Repositories (this guide contains the codehaus snapshot repository setup)
Creating JIRA issues
Find the project for the maven plugin at http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/BrowseProjects.jspa.
Before you create a new JIRA issue you should confirm that there is no existing issue already available.
If one already exists, check what other people have suggested for a suitable solution. If there is a patch already, try using that before making your own modifications.
Modifying the plugin source code
The first step should to create a unit test.
After the unit test has been created modify the code to pass the unit test.
Once the unit test is passing you can then build the plugin and attempt to use it locally via mvn install. You should check that the plugin works as expected in your project.
Deploying the plugin to an internal repository for use within your company
If you have an internal repository that is used by your company then you will want to deploy your patched versions to this repository until your patches have been applied to the plugin. If you don't have an internal repository you should consider setting one up, see Using Maven in a corporate environment for more details.
Copy the pom.xml to pom-internal.xml and make the following changes to the pom-internal.xml file.
- set the version to be -COMPANY instead of -SNAPSHOT. See Better Builds with Maven page 61 for an explanation of how version numbers are compared. e.g. if the version is
2.2-SNAPSHOTthen set it to2.2-COMPANYwhen the plugin is officially released as2.2the released version will be considered newer than your patched version and supersede it.
- add a distributionManagement section:
- deploy your version to your internal repository
mvn deploy
