How to keep Maven profiles which are activeByDefault active even if another profile gets activated?

Question

I have a profile in my pom.xml which should be always active unless it is explicitely deactivated (-P !firstProfile). I solved this by using the activeByDefault flag:

<

Answer 1

I wish there was such a possibility, I have often missed it. The only relevant JIRA issue I could find is this one:

MNG-4917: Profile not active even though it has activeByDefault set to true

And it's been resolved as Not A Problem.

I've stopped using activeByDefault, because this "all or nothing" approach made it worthless for me.

---

The only way to change this behavior is to write your own replacement for DefaultProfileSelector, register it as a plexus component with @Component( role = ProfileSelector.class ) and put it in ${MAVEN_HOME}/lib/ext (that way it will be picked as default profile selector). (If you are using Maven 3.0.2 or older you will also have to edit ${MAVEN_HOME}/bin/m2.conf to load lib/ext before it loads lib)