Maven: Unofficial artifact naming scheme?

Question

I'm creating some Maven artifacts for various dependencies for our projects, and while I'm taking my best guess at group / artifact IDs, I'd like to add something to flag them as "unofficial" and created by us for compilation, so that should we find official sources for the same thing in the future there's no confusion and we can simply change to point to the identifiers. Is there a best/common/reccomended practice for doing so?

I was just thinking something like setting groupId="org.providername.unofficial", but since Maven's all about "doing it our way" I just want to see if there's a precedent for something different already...

Answer 1

Maven coordinates to uniquely identify any artifact include groupId, artifactId and version. So, changing any of those would allow you to differentiate your artifact from other one. However if you want to be able to use your version instead of a standard artifact as one of the dependencies of some other component you would have to keep the same groupId and artifactId, or else you'd have to deal with excludes in that dependency. So, for that is would be the best to change just version, e.g. add some qualifier like 1.0mycompayname.

Answer 2

Is there a best/common/recommended practice for doing so?

To my knowledge, there is no official recommended practice for this (since the artifacts are non public after all) but I find that using a flag is a good idea that we also use (with an "internal" qualifier) and we also put such artifacts in a special "third-party" group of our repository manager.