Aliases

Aliases working in two ways:

  • Symlinks for paths

  • Additional mappings for artifact specifications

In the real world the same project can appear under different names as it was evolving or released differently. Therefore other projects may refer to those alternative names instead of using the name currently prefered by upstream.

Artifact aliases

XMvn provides a way to attach multiple artifact coordinates to a single artifact. Dependent projects that use alternative coordinates can then be built without the need to patch their POMs or alter the build by other means. It will also generate virtual provides for the alias, so it can be also used in Requires and BuildRequires. Creating an alias is achieved by %mvn_alias macro.

Example invocation
# com.example.foo:bar (the actual artifact existing in the project) will also
# be available as com.example.foo:bar-all
%mvn_alias com.example.foo:bar com.example.foo:bar-all

# You don't need to repeat the part of coordinates that stays the same
# (groupID in this case)
%mvn_alias com.example.foo:bar :bar-all

# You can specify multiple aliases at once
%mvn_alias com.example.foo:bar :bar-all :bar-lib

# The macro supports several shortcuts to generate multiple alisaes.
# Braces - {} - capture their content, which can then be referenced in the
# alias part with @N, where N is the index of the capture group.
# * acts as a wildcard (matching anything)
# The following generates aliases ending with shaded for all artifacts in the
# project
%mvn_alias 'com.example.foo:{*}' :@1-shaded

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