Build profiles are an important concept for unifying configuration differences between different environments. They also should capture information across all aspects of the POM.

Requirements

• offer a replacement for ./build.properties (the per user, per pom override, and the per user global override)
• filtering of resources
• different repositories
  • for deployment (dev, test, qa, production)
  • for dependency resolution (different use of snapshots mostly)
  • affect on local repository
• plexus application use case (having a generated test runtime, and a release runtime with different settings)
• m2 development use case (switching local repository, m2 home and settings by profile)
• changes to dependencies (allowing jdk specific, operating system specific, debugging built versions of libraries)
• modifications to the modules built (not convinced on this yet - http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-354)
• different configuration per user/profile (http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/maven-dev/200504.mbox/%3c1114638565.5813.422.camel@172.16.1.36%3e)
  • eg local system paths for certain plugins
• some profiles are for a user (ie the build.properties replacements), others would be committed to SCM. These might even be shared across projects
• there is a definite analogy to settings.xml