Some Words about Microlog and Some Maven Stuff

As you faithful readers know, I am a believer in “Release early, release often”. Therefore I have tried to streamline the release procedure as much as possible. It must not feel like a burden to do a release. In fact it should be as fun as watching a comedy film, almost at least. But this time it was not very fun.

About two weeks ago, one of my fellow Microlog developers committed some changes. It was time to make a new release! I always start out with the deployment of Maven artifacts to the Sonatype repository. Ever since I changed from using the website at SourceForge as a repository, to the Sonatype repository this is a process that works like a charm. It usually takes a little more than two minutes to do this. After that point the artifacts are available on a Nexus staging repository. If something is wrong, you can drop the release. If  the release seems to be ok, you have to close and promote the artifacts. When you close the staging release, a validation takes place. It checks if everything is ok.

The validation process has always worked for me since I first got it right. But not this time! It was complaining about missing information in all the module, information that is available in the parent module. As a coincidence, or not, a discussion about this was started on the Sonatype forums. As it turned out, this was a bug in a new validation scheme. There was a workaround, but I did not feel that it was worth it. From my experiences I could conclude that the folks at Sonatype usually fix this in a day or two. This time it took some days more.

When the validation bug was fixed it was time to give it a try again. This time the validation was complaining about a file not being signed (site.xml). A file that should not be signed, at least not according to me. This was part of the parent module. To get rid of this problem I decided to make a new sub-module for the site generation and try if I could sign the file this way. After a while I was able to sign the file. However now the site was not generated correctly. Not good! I moved the site.xml file back to the parent module, but kept the module since I thought the site generation was good anyway. The site generation worked again, but the file was not signed. Time to google. Now I found a solution that should work; disable the deployment of artifacts from the parent module. It worked, almost anyway. Now none of the artifacts was deployed. More googling. Aha, it is possible to disable the inheritance of some build plugins. Now it worked the way I wanted. Nice! The process of finding out how this should be done took me “only” about 4 hours. But there was one bonus; I could now disable artifacts modules that was not very useful to deploy. For those who wonders how to disable artifacts deployment, take a look at this helpful article.

Finally I managed to make the release and deploy the artifacts to the Sonatype repository. The artifacts are there in Maven central as well. For those of you who are interested, the version is now 2.3.5. Enjoy!