Question

I currently have a pom with platform specific profiles (e.g. linux 32bit, windows 64 bit, etc…). Additionally, I have set it up to automatically choose the invoker’s platform as a default.

Now, assume I am in a linux 32 machine: I also want to build for win64 by invoking mvn -Pwin64 pakage but in doing so, both the linux32 and win64 profiles get activated. I have tried activating the local platform profile with activeProfiles and using ativation tags. The trouble is that -P does not disable all other profiles as explained in the documentation:

This option takes an argument that is a comma-delimited list of
profile-ids to use. When this option is specified, no profiles other
than those specified in the option argument will be activated.

Am I understanding this wrong? How would you handle this?

Note: I know I could run mvn -P-linux32,win64 but that is only valid on linux32 platforms, and any mistakes may result in a bloated build with duplicate classes.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This statement from the profile docs:

As of Maven 3.0, profiles in the POM can also be activated based on properties from active profiles from the settings.xml.

Would lead me to try the solution below. Each developer defines his default platform as a property in his settings.xml file and overrides it on the cmdline if needed.

Developer’s settings.xml

<profile>
    <id>platform-config</id>
    <property>
        <name>build.platform</name>
        <value>win32</value>
    </property>
</profile>
....
<activeProfiles>
    <activeProfile>platform-config</activeProfile>
</activeProfiles>

Project’s pom.xml

<project>
...
<profiles>
    <profile>
        <id>win32</id>
        <activation>
            <property>
                <name>build.platform</name>
                <value>win32</value>
            </property>
        </activation>
        ...
    </profile>
    <profile>
        <id>linux32</id>
        <activation>
            <property>
                <name>build.platform</name>
                <value>linux32</value>
            </property>
        </activation>
        ...
    </profile>
</profiles>

Then, mvn install should activate the win32 profile because the default value for the build.platform property is win32, while mvn install -Dbuild.platform=linux32 will override the default property setting and use the Linux profile instead.