Copy bin included files into the output folder instead of only consider them in the package phase directly

[laeubi]

Currently bin included files are packaged as part of the package phase into the resulting jar.

This has the drawback that certain tool assume that the target/classes folder is something that can be seen as the result of the build as an exploded jar (e.g. when using that in classpathes).

For this to work there should be a ne mojo e.g. bound to the process-classes phase that do the copy to the output folder, the packaging phase can then simply package the result and do not need to perform the copy then.

[laeubi]

@mickaelistria @akurtakov what do you think? I have the feeling that if we do all the copy/processing that happens in PackagePluginMojo e.g. in prepare-package what is described as

perform any operations necessary to prepare a package before the actual packaging. This often results in an unpacked, processed version of the package.

then we might can use the standard maven-jar plugin here if everything is put into the target/classes directory?

[mickaelistria]

Moving to an earlier phase (eg process-resources or prepare-package would indeed be best. And indeed it would allow to rely more and standard Maven and thus to better interact with external tools with less customization on their end.
So far, I see only positive outcome if we change that as you suggested! I hope we're not missing some hidden important corner-case...

[laeubi]

I hope we're not missing some hidden important corner-case...

Every change breaks someones workflow ;-)

https://xkcd.com/1172/

[mickaelistria]

You're like a younger me. I used to quote this strip weekly on bugzilla not that many years ago ;) And I agree with it.
But still, things are not always breaking workflows (as in making them worse), actually they rarely do; and when they do, we have to deal with it at best. Compromise often works. Doing 3 steps ahead and being forced to make 1 step backward for some reason that are hard to mitigate is still a total of 2 steps ahead, better than 0.

[laeubi]

To summarize I think we will never know if we not try it out :-D

[akurtakov]

Let's do it in this case.

[laeubi]

Good candidate for 4.0!

[laeubi]

I investigated a bit on this and it seems that the bin.includes are not always a good citizen here...

1. for plugin-packaging the output folder is only considered to be included if the '.' folder is added to the classpath while this is often true, there might be cases where one things this is not required because everything is mentioned in the bin.includes
2. logically, this belongs to the process-resources phase but some mojos modify the resources later an before they are included (e.g. feature packaging)
3. Tycho packaging plugin also defines additionalFileSets mojo that can add additional stuff (even though one might better have used resources:copy-resources or similar

So I think I'll first try this for the plugin(test) packaging to see if anything fails, and probably fall back to a hybrid where resources are copied and later still included...