Why does maven need to generate a pom-transformed.xml ?

Question

In a maven webapp project, I noticed that there is a file in the target directory called pom-transformed.xml. How does maven use this file ?

Answer 1

I think that this is something to do with the transformation of artifact ids and version numbers that happened as part of the release step in Maven 2.1.x and early versions of 2.2.x. But I think this transformation was found to be broken, and has been removed from later Maven 2.2.x releases pending a redesign; e.g. see this Jira item.

If you see the file, you might be using an out-of-date version of Maven.

Answer 2

If I remember well this file was resulting of something called "POM interpolation" (the interpolation of expressions like ${project.version} into their value) in versions prior to 2.2.

POM interpolation upon installation/deployment to repositories has been completely removed from Maven 2.2.

See Artifact-Coordinate Expression Transformation and POM Interpolation Refactor.