[Building Sakai] Using maven profiles for sakai versions in contrib projects

[Jim Eng]

I have a couple recommendations based on the work I did yesterday creating maven profiles for the evalsys project to make it easier to build and deploy with sakai 2.6.x and sakai 2.7.x (as well as sakai 2.5.x).   

First, I used the profiles from gradebook2 as an example in writing these profiles.  As Matthew Jones suggested a while back, it will be helpful if most contrib projects use the same id's for their profiles.  For evalsys, we used the same profile id's as gradebook2, and it would be excellent if other people used these as well: sakai2.5, sakai2.6, sakai2.7, etc.  Also it would be really good if each project had a readme file in its root directory with information about adapting the source to build/run with various versions of sakai.  That readme should give the id's of the profiles, and any other changes that should be made.  For example, evalsys has the version of sakai hard-coded in the parent element of its root pom.  The readme should mention that that needs to be changed to the sakai version you are using.

Second, I had a hard time tracking down the right way to specify dependencies for jars that come from indie projects in 2.7.x.  I would like to create a page in confluence that shows the dependency needed for each profile.  If that already exists somewhere, I won't bother, but if it doesn't, I will add it.  Any suggestions about where it should be in confluence would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Jim