Question

There’s a Java library that I would like to use in my project. My project uses Maven to pull in dependencies and it works great for everything except this one library. The problem is, this library never has releases. The author maintains the source in a Subversion repository and only makes changes in trunk.

Is there a way I can tell Maven to

1. Update (or check out) the library’s source tree from Subversion
2. Build it according to its POM
3. Use the resulting jar as a dependency for this project
4. Do this regularly (possibly at each build)
5. For bonus points, mark which Subversion revision of that library I want to use

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you don’t control something, you can’t… control it. So I would:

• checkout the sources from the project repo
• put them under version control in your vcs
• build a release (and tag the library in your vcs)
• distribute the released artifact through a corporate repository

You don’t really want to automate this more than that (what if the author commits something that breaks your code, what if you need to fix a bug in a released version of your code but can’t use the exact same library). Put it under source control and manage the release yourself.