Have Maven fail with a message if a certain profile is used

Question

Let's say I have a profile "dostuff" defined in a pom.xml that uses a plugin to do some stuff when the user runs mvn -P dostuff:

<profiles>
    <profile>
        <id>dostuff</id>
        <build>
            <plugins>
                <plugin>
                    ...
                </plugin>
            <plugins>
        </build>
    </profile>
<profiles>

The task the profile performs have been replaced by a new non-maven command entirely.

Of course I can just remove the profile, but that has two problems:

1. It doesn't fail the build, it just produces a warning:

[WARNING] The requested profile "dostuff" could not be activated because it does not exist.

2. It doesn't give the user any information that they should use the new command instead.

So, I would like any use of the profile "dostuff" to produce an error with a message telling them to use the new non-maven command instead.

Is that even possible? It's a plus if the solution doesn't require a plugin.

Answer 1

The maven-enforcer-plugin has a built-in rule to require a profile is activated. Perhaps you could write your own rule to ban a profile, using that code as a starting point.

Answer 2

Just put the profile in your pom and use it to show a message and throw an exception. You could e.g. use the Antrun plugin to echo a message.