We are currently attempting to port a very (very) large project built with ant to maven (while also moving to svn). All possibilities are being explored in remodeling the project structure to best fit the maven paradigm.
Now to be more specific, I have come across classifiers and would like to know how I could use them to my advantage, while refraining from "classifier anti-patterns".
Thanks
from: http://maven.apache.org/pom.html
classifier: You may occasionally find a fifth element on the coordinate, and that is the classifier. We will visit the classifier later, but for now it suffices to know that those kinds of projects are displayed as groupId:artifactId:packaging:classifier:version.
and
The classifier allows to distinguish artifacts that were built from the same POM but differ in their content. It is some optional and arbitrary string that - if present - is appended to the artifact name just after the version number. As a motivation for this element, consider for example a project that offers an artifact targeting JRE 1.5 but at the same time also an artifact that still supports JRE 1.4. The first artifact could be equipped with the classifier jdk15 and the second one with jdk14 such that clients can choose which one to use.
Another common use case for classifiers is the need to attach secondary artifacts to the project's main artifact. If you browse the Maven central repository, you will notice that the classifiers sources and javadoc are used to deploy the project source code and API docs along with the packaged class files.