Context

Maven plugins are described in META-INF/maven/plugin.xml descriptor, which is in general generated by maven-plugin-plugin. Information for the generator are written as javadoc annotations in java source: see maven-plugin-tools-java.

Using java 5 annotations instead of javadoc ones have multiple benefits:

• compile-time checks for plugin metadata, with enums for some annotations
• inheritance support
• annotations are supported in most IDEs, providing code-completion and syntactic checks

Existing implementations

Multiple implementations of such annotations exist:

• JFrog's Maven Anno Mojo: see the wiki or annotations source
• Maven MNG-2521, with its proposal from 2007 providing a source branch and its annotations

Proposal

WIP