[MWAR-448] packaging dependencies fails with "mvn install" but not "mvn package"

[jira-importer]

Kari J. Niemi opened MWAR-448 and commented

I think we discovered a minor odd difference with war-packaging between "mvn package" or "mvn install". We would expect that only difference between the two is that the latter also installs the produced stuff in the local maven repository.

 

We are packaging a few jars to a war. We have a parent pom with some modules, and that is defined as a dependency in the pom.xml that produces a war-package. Like this:

my-war-thingie:pom.xml (packaging:war)

• dependency: some-parent

some-parent:pom.xml (packaging:pom)

• module1 (packaging:jar)
• module2 (packaging:jar)

Earlier we had a different structure and everything was just fine: we did not the have the child-modules but the parent-pom produced the jar. When we changed the structure to the one described above: our CI was still OK, some developers building OK as well -but some developers had failing maven builds because of missing "some-parent.jar".

 

It was bit of devastating hunt, but finally we discovered that "mvn package" was building OK, but "mvn install" looks for "some-parent.jar".

We don't actually mind if the above scenario would fail in both cases, or if it was successful - we would just expect that it works the same way for both. If this is intended behaviour, it would be nice to have it documented.

FWIW: in our case, we anyway wanted to define direct dependencies from the war-packaging to the child-modules. So actually, we are OK wih our builds already. But the difference caused so may doubts about our builds reproducibility - and also, it seems like a bug - so I wanted to be good citizen and report the problem.

Edit: further note from our troubleshooting sessions: we don't have the "type" for the dependency at all in my-war-thingie:pom.xml. Yesterday, we did experiment setting the type as "pom" -and as a consequence,  both "mvn package" and "mvn install" were successful. The default as we know, should/would be "jar". Maybe the missing dependency type is for some odd reason resolved differently for "maven package" and "maven install"?

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Affects: 3.3.2

[jira-importer]

Slawomir Jaranowski commented

please attach minimal project, which can reproduce your problem.

[jira-importer]

Dennis Lundberg commented

In my opinion what you have described above is working as intended. If you add a dependency on some-parent and don't specify the type, Maven and its plugins will assume that some-parent produces a jar artifact. If some-parent does not produce a jar artifact (as is the case) then some plugins will fail if they cannot find that jar artifact.

So for things to work properly you must specify type=pom in some-parent, as well as any other place that uses some-parent as a dependency.