Hi all, Juul Hobert and I took it upon ourselves to see if we can resolve the following tickets. - MNG-7344 (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MNG-7344) - MPH-183 (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MPH-183) These were originally implemented by Jan-Jelle Kester in a PoC, and later further by Maarten Mulders.
Maarten has already posted some output of the plugin on the mailing list, however after the immutable model was merged it broke. We had to make some additional changes to make it work again and added some improvements. I've ran the new version of the help plugin with Maven 3.9.6 and 4.0.0-alpha12, you can find the results in the screenshots below. Left Maven 4, Right Maven 3 [image: Pasted image 20240329124737.png] Left Maven 4, Right Maven 3 [image: Pasted image 20240329124805.png] The PR's can be found here: - Maven core changes: https://github.com/apache/maven/pull/603 (should be referred to as MNG-7344) - Maven help plugin changes: https://github.com/apache/maven-help-plugin/pull/37 (MPH-183) - Note that to make the help plugin work we had to do some ugly reflection in order to find the correct methods and instance variables. If we merge core and update core dependency in the help plugin, we should be able to remove this entirely and make use of the actual methods. Current challenges we face - We can't integration test it properly (yet), as core does not (and probably should not) have the new help plugin code base. The help plugin requires core to update before we can integration test it in that project. We also probably require reflection if we were to test it in the integration test repository for these reasons. - We are unaware of any other methods to perhaps make the code cleaner, more maintainable or more readable as it is located in quite a complex part of maven. We would like to gather some input on the current state. We would appreciate some early code reviews and your thoughts in order to bring it to maven core. Sincerely, Giovanni van der Schelde & Juul Hobert
