Disabling goals in a maven plugin execution

Question

I have a setup where most of my projects require the xtend plugin to be run both for the compile and testCompile goals. I describe it in a pluginManagement section:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.eclipse.xtend</groupId>
    <artifactId>xtend-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.5.3</version>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <goals>
                <goal>compile</goal>
                <goal>testCompile</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

Now, there are some projects that don't need one goal or the other. I've tried the inherited tag, played around with random attributes but none worked. How can I override the execution to contain only the desired goal?

UPDATE: The conclusion of the story is that individial goals cannot be disabled. The smallest scope that can be managed is the execution.

Answer 1

Generally, you can only disables executions with a trick:

Set the executions phase to non existant phase (dont-execute). Note however, that you have to use two different execution ids to allow both goals to be individually turned off:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.eclipse.xtend</groupId>
    <artifactId>xtend-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.5.3</version>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>xtend-compile</id>
            <goals>
                <goal>compile</goal>
                <goal>testCompile</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>
        <execution>
            <id>xtend-testCompile</id>
            <goals>
                <goal>testCompile</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

Submodule:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.eclipse.xtend</groupId>
    <artifactId>xtend-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.5.3</version>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>xtend-testCompile</id>
            <phase>dont-execute</phase>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

In your specific case, you could, of course, also use the skipXtend configuration property in each execution to not skip the execution, but only prevent the plugin from doing anything:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.eclipse.xtend</groupId>
    <artifactId>xtend-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.5.3</version>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>xtend-testCompile</id>
            <configuration>
                <skipXtend>xtend-testCompile</skipXtend>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>