在企业环境中分发maven settings.xml文件

Question

We want to deploy maven in our company, and we are wondering what's the best way to distribute the file settings.xml and maybe associated data to each developer. We see these constraints:

• We want a ' batteries included ' strategy': The minimal amount of work to set up a correct environment.
• We have roaming profiles , so we can't store the full maven repository cache in the profile (need for creating a folder for this cache outside the profile)
• We want to push little updates to this file without destroying local modifications (so no overwrite, but eg a subversion merge would be usable)
• We want to use developer-style tools only, so we don't depend on the windows guys with all associated overhead of a release to push a little change (using GPOs or SMS to push this file is not preferred)

So how does your company handle this?

Answer 1

Put the settings.xml in a version control system, we use Git, we tell the repository to ignore the repository directory in ~/.m2 in a .gitignore file and then just pull the settings.xml file on a regular basis from a central remote repository, in our case a private Gitorious` server.

Once this file is set up and working once, it is rare that it should ever change in most cases. So just putting the settings.xml file on a wiki and having the user install it when they are installing the version control software and Maven isn't much of an extra burden.