Open questions

This page lists some issues or "TODO" not yet addressed.

Plugin parameters

Should useIncrementalCompilation be more fine-grained? It could have an option for cleaning the target directory only if a file is deleted. Currently, the target directory is cleaned if a file is added or deleted.

Should fileExtensions be a GLOB pattern instead of only a list of file extensions? Or just should this parameter be deprecated (is it really needed)?

Implementation

getMavenCompilerPluginVersion() currently fetches the information from the META-INF/maven/org.apache.maven.plugins/maven-compiler-plugin/pom.properties file. But it could fetch the same information from the Implementation-Version attribute in META-INF/MANIFEST.MF, which would be more standard.

Varias:

• Class Providers is not used anywhere, but has @Named and @Provides annotations. Is it needed?
• As of Java 17, calls to Stream.collect(Collectors.toList()) could be replaced by Stream.toList().
• Revisit if we really want absolute paths: search all occurrences of toAbsolutePath().
• MOJO contains only an execute() method with no return value and no checked exception. Why not a Runnable instead?

Caching

It may be advantageous to reuse StandardJavaFileManager for main compilation, test compilation and Javadoc, because that interface can manage a cache to JAR files. Currently the plugin uses that interface in a try ... finally block, because JavaFileManager needs to release resources after use. We may need a cache mechanism with the same safety level as try ... finally, but wider scope. An alternative would be to compile main, test and javadoc in the same MOJO.