title: Maven assembly descriptor properties
body: <p>I want to pack two or more very similar distributions, the only difference is path to data set that will be inside those distributions.</p>
  
  <p>Given this example for path: <strong>${project.basedir}/src/config/dataset1</strong></p>
  
  <pre class="lang-xml prettyprint-override"><code>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
  &lt;assembly xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-assembly-plugin/assembly/1.1.2"
            xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
            xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-assembly-plugin/assembly/1.1.2 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/assembly-1.1.2.xsd"&gt;
  
      &lt;id&gt;dataset1&lt;/id&gt;
      &lt;formats&gt;
          &lt;format&gt;zip&lt;/format&gt;
      &lt;/formats&gt;
  
      &lt;fileSets&gt;
          &lt;fileSet&gt;
              &lt;directory&gt;${project.basedir}/src/config/dataset1/aaa&lt;/directory&gt;
              &lt;outputDirectory&gt;conf/aaa&lt;/outputDirectory&gt;
          &lt;/fileSet&gt;
          &lt;fileSet&gt;
              &lt;directory&gt;${project.basedir}/src/config/dataset1/bbb&lt;/directory&gt;
              &lt;outputDirectory&gt;conf/bbb&lt;/outputDirectory&gt;
          &lt;/fileSet&gt;
      &lt;/fileSets&gt;
  
      &lt;!-- MANY MORE FILESETS... --&gt;
  
  &lt;/assembly&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now I want exactly the same assembly descriptor for different data set, for example: <strong>${project.basedir}/src/config/dataset2</strong></p>
  
  <p>Off course I could create two assembly descriptors. But then again I would have to keep in mind to change multiple places when needed, or worse when adding another dataset or two.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a way how solve this, like creating multiple executions and passing properties to it? Or something ever nicer?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong>
  This wish item would solve everything:
  <a href="https://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MASSEMBLY-445" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MASSEMBLY-445</a></p>