Aggregation Artifacts

When I introduced artifacts, I pointed out that some of these artifacts might not have any actual payload, but purely exist to aggregate other artifacts via dependencies.

One technique to use this is described in http://blog.artifact-software.com/tech/

A problem that I'm mulling in my mind is figuring out when the aggregation should happen:

• Build time?
• Packaging time?
• Installation time?

Build time is probably the right answer - I'll need to play with maven build scoped dependencies soon to see whether the source code for an aggregation artifact (which in maven would consist of just the pom file) work as I'd expect...