Maven 'targets'?

[jbetancourt]

With ant we can do: ant -p

and get a nice list of applicable targets for the project. I've looked but don't see anything similar with Maven. There are -h and -g, but these don't help or are targeted as well as the ant projecthelp task.

If there really isn't something similar, perhaps its just a simple matter of adding one to the maven.xml file. Something like:

  <goal name="projecthelp" description="show the project specific goals">
       <echo>
        maven goals&#58;
            preparedocs ................. o Extra preparation for the documentation
            docclean ...................... o Delete temporary and distribution directories for docs
            docpdf ......................... o Compile reference documentation to pdf
            dochtml ....................... o Compile reference documentation to chunked html
            dochtmlsingle ............... o Compile reference documentation to single html
            refdoc .......................... o Generate and copy reference documentation
       </echo>
  </goal>

The use would be: maven projecthelp

----
Josef Betancourt

[pburleson]

That's essentially what we do. We make it the default goal as well. So just running "maven" prints out our usage.

[jbetancourt]

Thats a great idea. We do that with our ant script; the default is the project help.

BTW, with Ant, I tried to code a call to Ant's internal method that does the -projecthelp, so that we could decorate it with our custom needs, but all that is private, could not even subclass and use easily, so gave up.