Maven standardized support for multi-releases jars
I mean how and where to configure multiple versions in maven? I know I can run an ant task, but can I do it with say maven-compiler plugin or another standardized way?
I believe the maven-compiler-plugin
is not the appropriate place to take care of the release or even if we say ant tasks. Its supposed to be compiling the sources of a project seeking the need of which it has though introduced a flag
-release N
whose usage seems similar to that of the -source N
and -target N
.
It shall compile for a specific VM version(N) and shall support targets: 6, 7, 8, 9. It is similar to the new flag introduced in javac
as
--release <release>
The java way of creating a multi-release jar, placing some files in the META-INF/versions/9
directory after this shall be of the format :
jar --create --file mr.jar -C foo classes --release 9 -C foo9 classes
In terms of MR-JAR maven implementation, one of the alternates currently could be as linked by @simas or listed below as proposals(couldn't get to find their released implementations) in one of the analysis.
Note: Shouldn't one rather be interested in moving to JMOD
s instead of considering MR-JAR
for versions 9 and later?
And where and how should I place the different versions of java classes?
In the document Java 9 and its Impact on Maven Projects, the proposals to solve for the MR-JAR has been to either keep a 1 to 1 translation to the structure as mentioned in the JEP-238
project root
src/main/java
- A.java
- B.java
- C.java
- D.java
src/main/java9
- A.java
- B.java
src/main/java10
- A.java
which though can work with different executions
in maven but could possibly be inconvenient to be exposed to IDEs.
Another alternate with a sample hboutemy/maven-jep238 has been listed with the same to make use of following structure:-
multimodule root
multirelease-base/src/main/java
- A.java
- B.java
- C.java
- D.java
multirelease-nine/src/main/java
- A.java
- B.java
multirelease-ten/src/main/java
- A.java
multirelease/src/assembly/mvjar.xml
October 4, 2017
I couldn't find an official documentation or implementation where these proposals are consumed by an open source/organisation, hence inferring its not very plainly possible using Maven currently.