Jason van Zyl wrote:

> I'm sure we could find a clean place to inject an override for the
> default version of the compiler plugin in 3.x and then use that version
> of Maven to build as many on the grid as we can.

How about this: We implement some lifecycle participant, let's call it the PluginVersionEnforcer, that would listen for afterProjectsRead() and iterates over all projects in the session in order to mutate plugin versions in their models.

This lifecycle participant could be reused for all kinds of plugins if it gets configured via execution properties, that it can read from the session, e.g.

  -Dorg.apache.maven.plugins:maven-compiler-plugin=2.1-SNAPSHOT

which could be added to the configuration of grid builds.

This participant would be some little JAR that we could drop into a regular Maven 3.x distro on the grid.


Benjamin