Automatic Generation of class files (JCasGen) from Maven

Hello,

I'm currently working on a distributed project involving UIMA. At this stage,
sometimes modifications to the UIMA descriptor files are absolutely necessary
and, unfortunately, this confuses our VCS. Whenever JCasGen is run from within
Eclipse or similar, it updates *all* generated class files, which leads the VCS
to treating them as new commits. The problem here is, when editing the
descriptors on different branches, while the merging of the descriptor files
goes well most of the time, the merging of the class files fails most of the
time. This leaves the merger with several dozen conflicts.

The current policy is to then just delete those files and run JCasGen on the
merged branch. Of course, the actual problem here is, that one shouldn't really
track those files in the first place.

But the matter is slightly more delicate. After checking out the project from
version control, the project should be readily compilable, without further
setup. That's why we're using Maven to fetch all dependencies and automate the
build process. Without having these files in source control, they have to be
generated first.

So the real question is: is there any way to run a JCasGen from within the Maven
build? Probably a plugin? Of course, one could just spawn a process to call
org.apache.uima.tools.jcasgen.Jg, but I wanted to ask if such a thing already
existed.

Thanks,
Aleks

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