Maven deploy transaction boundaries

Question

How does repositry manager know when maven is starting a deployment and finishing it ?For example when mvn deploy command is executed maven uploads bunch of files. Now how should a server know when maven is done uploading all the files?

I thought maven-metadata.xml file at package level is the last file being updated ,but realized its not always the case.For example javadocs gets updated after update to package level maven-medata.xml

Is there any specifications around in what order maven should update the repository?

Answer 1

There is no RFC for this that I'm aware of.

I am quite familiar with Maven and it's metadata. I'm not talking about any repository manager in particular at the moment. I'm only just reverse-engineering the logic for it (mostly guessing, but also how I would implement it; and I am working on implementing a repository manager myself, by the way). I would like to invite the developers of Nexus, Artifactory and Archiva to also share their thoughts, views, experience on this kind of functionality, if of course they wish to share.

Basically, what a repository manager would (or could) probably do is this:

• When an artifact (and all it's accompanying files) is being deployed, the respective format or (layout provider - Maven, Nuget, NPM) would trigger a new transaction for the artifact's base path+version (org/foo/bar/1.0) with a inactivity grace period
• While the artifact's file are being deployed under the base path for that version, the transaction would be open
• The "transaction" would be closed automatically when:
  • There is no activity under the path for a given waiting period
  • Or an identifiable last file is uploaded/updated (in the case of Maven, normally this would be the maven-metadata.xml)

@user93796 : I see you're asking a lot of questions about Maven and Maven Metadata lately. Feel free to contact me by e-mail (my SO username @ gmail.com), if you'd like to have a more detailed chat on the topic. :)