Repository Metadata

Currently we have a number of small metadata files:

• RELEASE.version.txt (detemines the latest release of the artifact)
• SNAPSHOT.version.txt (determines the timestamp/build# of the latest build of the artifact)
• LATEST.version.txt (determines the latest build of the artifact, whether it be a timestamp or a release)
• plugins.xml (maps plugin prefixes to artifact Id within the group)

With the advent of version ranges, this will require use to get a list of versions for an artifact also. This has gotten to "critical mass" of metadata that we should move to handling general directory metadata.

We can safely remove reading of plugins.xml now since there hasn't been a release cut that uses it, and there are not significant amounts to convert in the repo. We should continue to read the others, but deprecate it.

Location of metadata

Metadata will be stored at the directory level, allowing different metadata for each granularity. The file will be called maven-metadata.xml

Version Information for Artifact Directories

<metadata>
  <versioning>
    <release>1.0.2</release>
    <latest>1.0.3-SNAPSHOT</latest>
    <snapshot>1.0.3-20051011.123014-5</snapshot>
    <versions>
      <version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
      <version>1.0.0</version>
      <version>1.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
      <version>1.0.1</version>
      <version>1.0.2-SNAPSHOT</version>
      <version>1.0.2</version>
      <version>1.0.3-SNAPSHOT</version>
    </versions>
  </versioning>
</metadata>

Plugin Information for Group Directories

<metadata>
  <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
  <plugins>
    <plugin>
      <prefix>myPlugin</prefix>
      <artifactId>myPlugin-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    </plugin>
  </plugins>
</metadata>