How to use platform architecture in Maven to determine dependency?

Question

As the question states is there a nice way to use dependencies based on the platform architecture while building maven artefacts. I know about profiles and how to use them. For this special purpose i dont want to incorporate them into my build.

The problem in detail could be described as follows:

• Multi module maven project
• Continous integration and people on the project use evenly distributed platform architectures
• Dependency to native system library

Solutions which i do not want to use in the settings:

• No dependency redundancy
• No maven profiles (or at least maven profiles which are automatically chosen by platform architecture)

As an example:

Person1

• (using linux i686) builds project
• x86 libaries are bundled to every subproject and the resulting artefacts are being build

Person2

• (using win32) builds project
• 32 bit librariers are bundled as above

Continous integration

• is running like the production environment on linux amd64
• integrate amd64 libraries

Edit about Profiles

I know that profiles are one solution to do this. But what i want to achieve is that you checkout your project from some random source version control and build a project with native libraries out of the box without doing anything (as long as the platform meets the requirement of the configured ones).

I do not want to configure these profile settings nor i want to run a specific target explicitally. If there is such thing with profiles i would like to see an example which determines automatically the platform architecture and runs a target. IF there is one without profiles i would prefer it because it is much less complex while having different existent combinations of profiles(including tests and other usecases).

Having solely profiles feels a little bloated to me and manual efforts are required.

I hope someone has a neat suggestion because im somehow stuck on this.

Answer 1

I don't know of any way to do this without profiles. This is the main use case for which profiles were added to maven. You can do it using the following:

<profiles>
  <profile>
    <activation>
      <os>
        <name>Windows XP</name>
        <family>Windows</family>
        <arch>x86</arch>
      </os>
    </activation>
    ...
  </profile>
  <profile>
    <activation>
      <os>
        <family>Linux</family>
        <arch>x64</arch>
      </os>
    </activation>
    ...
  </profile>
  <profile>
    <activation>
      <property>
         <name>integration-test</name>
      </property>
    </activation>
    ...
  </profile>
</profiles>

Then, when someone checks out a project and builds it on a Linux x64 machine, they will automatically get everything under the Linux x64 profile. If they also provided the property -Dintegration-test on the command line, they would activate the integration-test profile as well. You can have any number of active profiles, which are combined to create the effective POM for the build. These profiles can be defined in a shared parent POM for all projects that you work on, so developers don't have to change their settings.xml files.

To get more info on the activation of profiles, check out: http://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-profiles.html.