Njord: where to put publishing properties?

[cstamas]

I want to pitch a discussion about Njord, as people started integrating Njord into their builds in various ways. I always trumpeted that "publishing is orthogonal to builds", essentially Njord, unlike other publishing solutions, are not there to "grow into the tissue" of your project. It can peacefully live next to it. Still, if one wants, can "deeply integrate" it by for example putting Njord into project/build/extensions/extension[] in parent POM and it works okay.

Still, there are questions like where to put publishing properties?

Historically (in Maveniverse) but also elsewhere, this was the recommended pattern, example of QDox project:
paul-hammant/qdox#285

As one of the many ideas that Njord pushes for is to stop "custom naming" distribution servers (in OSS/S01 times each project -- think mojohaus, plexus, takari, etc) everyone came up with "own" names like takari-releases, plexus-releases, etc... all this ended up on users maintaining those projects (or multiple of those) to have copy-paste server entries in their own settings.xml while effectively we could talk about TWO possible services: OSS or S01. Today, every "standalone" OSS project publishes to sonatype-central-portal and nowhere else. So Njord pushes also to stop this copy-pasta problem, and offers solution if POM changes are not possible: redirects in settings.xml.

Still, there came the question to put these three key properties into POM properties:

• njord.publisher
• njord.releaseUrl
• njord.snapshotUrl

And this is where the problems started: in original idea (provide them as settings/servers/server[]/config/*) there is a proper scoping happening, and Njord "kicks in" when given RemoteRepository asked for (having the same ID as settings server; usual Maven thing to set up things like auth): if this property is present, Njord should kick in. But, with adding those properties to project, they are always present, so scoping needs to be done somehow.