title: How to use or abuse artifact classifiers in maven?
body: <p>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.</p>
  
  <p><strong>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".</strong></p>
  
  <p>Thanks </p>
  
  <p>from: <a href="http://maven.apache.org/pom.html" rel="noreferrer">http://maven.apache.org/pom.html</a></p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>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.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>and</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>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.</p>
    
    <p>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.</p>
  </blockquote>