Define argLine property rather than setting it in surefire, to ease integration with other plugins

[slanglois]

The parent pom of the SDK currently defines this:

       <plugin>
         <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
         <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
         <version>${maven.surefire.version}</version>
         <configuration>
             <argLine>${app.testing.jvm.args}</argLine>
         </configuration>
       </plugin>

This makes it impossible for other plugins to redefine this argLine setting.
My use case is the maven-jacoco-plugin, which adds a java agent on the command line to generate some code coverage.
The warning at the beginning of that page explains it very well.
It would be much more convenient not to configure this in the surefire plugin, but just defining the argLine property:

<argLine>-Xms256m -Xmx1524m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -Duser.language=en</argLine>

(And by the way, this could be a nicer way to add the spring-loaded argument on the command line too...)

[mindthegab]

I am not clear about this one.

Can be added at maven top level in the pom? i.e. applies to the JVM that runs maven or to a forked JVM?

Or you mean surefire.argLine?

Re spring-loaded, we tried a lot but since tomcat is not forked we were not able to pass parameters via Maven but we had to call maven with the agent. C

Can you elaborate a bit on this issue?

Moving to enhancement and post 2.1.1.

[slanglois]

I mean that the argLine parameter should be defined as a property of the pom, rather than a configuration of surefire.

 <properties>
   <argLine>-Xms256m -Xmx1524m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -Duser.language=en</argLine>
 </properties>
 ...
 <plugin>
   <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
   <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
   <configuration>
     <!-- Do not define argLine here! -->
   </configuration>
 </plugin>

This has the same effect, but allows other plugins - such as JaCoCo - to alter this value.