[MNG-6869] New flag to verify the status

[jira-importer]

Robert Scholte opened MNG-6869 and commented

While working on INFRA-19861 we had issues with invalid changes in the settings.xml.
This was detected too late. After installation mvn --version is called, but it will only show the version of Maven.
It would be better to have a flag that verifies it a bit more:

• can Maven read/write to the local repository
• can Maven access all predefined repositories? (does the proxy work?)
  This gives a much better feedback if Maven can do its job.

Current workaround: call something like mvn help:evaluate -Dexpression=settings.localRepository -q -DforceStdout

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Issue Links:

• MNG-7075 mvnDebug should only enter debug mode if not an informative or encryption switch has been passed

Remote Links:

• GitHub Pull Request #995
  

0 votes, 6 watchers

[jira-importer]

Michael Osipov commented

Something like maven:verify-environment?

[jira-importer]

Robert Scholte commented

That would make it a plugin with a goal, that's not what I want. Could be as easy as --status

[jira-importer]

Michael Osipov commented

Sounds good to me.

[jira-importer]

Maarten Mulders commented

Giovds is working on it, but I can't assign him.

[jira-importer]

Maarten Mulders commented

Let's try to wrap up this topic and see if we can find some consensus moving forward.

As far as I'm concerned:

• This is a helpful feature, as it supports people who want to troubleshoot why "Maven doesn't work".
• It does not cover all possible cases, and I think that's perfectly fine. It doesn't have to. It should detect a few common causes for problems that people encounter with Maven.
• The code has been reviewed and all objections on code level have been addressed and fixed.
• The functionality cannot be part of a plugin. If it were, users whould have to download it, but they are having problems with Maven so they can't rely on that.
• The functionality cannot be an extension. If it were, we cannot assign a CLI flag (--status) to something that may or may not be present in the Maven installation.

So my vote would be to embrace it, and if we find false positives in the outcomes we could fix them.

WDYT?