[MNG-4917] Profile not active even though it has activeByDefault set to true

[jira-importer]

Benson Margulies opened MNG-4917 and commented

I've got a parent pom with a profile with <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>.

You can retrieve it for yourself via git clone git://git.apache.org/webservices-xmlschema.git.

The problem is the sourcecheck profile in the parent pom.

running mvn -Psourcecheck works as expected, but running without the -P fails to activate the profile.

the help plugin, I think, has separate problems in this area, or perhaps it's not supposed to look at -P?

---

Affects: 3.0, 3.8.5

Attachments:

• pom.xml (2.65 kB)

Issue Links:

• MNG-8292 Rework profile activation
  ("is part of")

3 votes, 10 watchers

[jira-importer]

Benjamin Bentmann commented

Standalone demo POM.

[jira-importer]

Benjamin Bentmann commented

>mvn help:active-profiles -N
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO]
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building XmlSchema 2.0-SNAPSHOT
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO]
[INFO] --- maven-help-plugin:2.1.1:active-profiles (default-cli) @ xmlschema ---
[INFO]
Active Profiles for Project 'org.apache.ws.xmlschema:xmlschema:pom:2.0-SNAPSHOT':

The following profiles are active:

 - maven-3 (source: pom)

And from Introduction to Build Profiles:

This profile will automatically be active for all builds unless another profile in the same pom is activated using one of the previously described methods. All profiles that are active by default are automatically deactivated when a profile in the pom is activated on the command line or through its activation config.

In short, the profile "maven-3" disables "sourcecheck".

[jira-importer]

Benson Margulies commented

New behavior in 3.0, right?

[jira-importer]

Benjamin Bentmann commented

No, as can be seen from the example POM I provided. You should also keep in mind that your POM by design uses a profile that only Maven 3.0 properly activates.

[jira-importer]

Jesse Glick commented

So activeByDefault does not mean what you would intuitively think it means—that the profile is active unless disabled. Rather, it means it is active only if Maven cannot find some other—probably unrelated—profile to activate. Basically this mode is useless.

[jira-importer]

Joel Croteau commented

This is an incredibly inane design choice. It makes activeByDefault very unpredictable, creating side effects in potentially totally unrelated areas of the POM, and has the potential to allow for some very hard to diagnose bugs in POM files. Please fix this or give us another option.

[jira-importer]

Delany commented

I feel like yet another casualty of a long running practical joke. Its time to admit the mistake, reopen the ticket, and make it mean what it says: active - by - default

[jira-importer]

Ronny Perinke commented

And of course, this highly questionable design decision is not mentioned in the POM reference.

[jira-importer]

Slawomir Jaranowski commented

Is it a bug or feature ... ?

Some of proposition to resolve issue:

• should be better documented
• display warning is activation is used in wrong way
• fix and activate profile marked as activeByDefault

[jira-importer]

Delany commented

When I need my snapshot profile to be mutually exclusive to my release profile, for example, I bind them both to the presence/absence of a property. So there are ways of achieving this same effect, and without the side-effect of prohibiting the use of more opt-in profiles.

That said, I don't like the idea of changing behaviour. Why not deprecate it in 3.9.0 and remove it in 4.0.0, while adding

<activation><active>true</active></activation>

or better still

<activation>true</activation> 

[jira-importer]

Alexander Kriegisch commented

Like others have said before, this mode is basically useless, because

• it does not do at all what a user would expect,
• it is unpredictable.

Please, either fix it (much preferred) or remove it from Maven completely to prevent further harm. I cannot imagine any meaningful use case for the current "implementation" (double quotes, because I consider it buggy).

Edit: If anyone is interested in my current workaround:

<activation>
  <jdk>[1.)</jdk>
</activation>

[jira-importer]

Guillaume Nodet commented

MNG-8286 will provide the following:

<activation>
  <condition>true</condition>
</activation> 

which is the most intuitive imho.

 

I'll try to better document the activeByDefault in the schema.

[jira-importer]

Guillaume Nodet commented

It seems clearly documented at https://maven.apache.org/pom.html and

maven/api/maven-api-model/src/main/mdo/maven.mdo

Lines 2758 to 2760 in 85f5dca

	<description>If set to true, this profile will be active unless another profile in this
	pom is activated using the command line -P option or by one of that profile's
	activators.</description>

, so I'm closing this bug.

[jira-importer]

Andrey Kuznetsov commented

gnodet, <condition>true</condition> looks great. It would be natural to mark confusing activeByDefault option as deprecated or not recommended.

[jira-importer]

Guillaume Nodet commented

Looking at the code, it seems clear that the behaviour was there by design from the beginning, so given there's no easy replacement, I don't really why it should be deprecated.

Unless someone comes with a better name, in which case, it could be deprecated in favour of that new option.