prepackaged VS Polyglot for Maven

Maven is great so long as there's a plugin to do what you need to do. If there isn't, it's quite possible that writing one will be simpler than trying to coax Maven into doing something unorthodox.

For example, here's an old plugin I put together to allow easy publishing of a third-party artefact to a repository that didn't have a web interface for such things: https://github.com/andrewaylett/prepackaged

It's old enough that the infrastructure I set up around it has bit-rotted -- I've just pushed a clone to GitHub to share here :). I'd hope using modern language features would make it easier still.

And you don't even need to use XML with Polyglot Maven

https://github.com/takari/polyglot-maven

If you prefer the shorter alternative, you might want to use the Polyglot XML extension https://github.com/takari/polyglot-maven/tree/master/polyglot-xml

Here you go: https://github.com/takari/polyglot-maven

Fun fact, POM files can be in formats other than XML (although I have no idea if IJ would tolerate such shenanigans): https://github.com/takari/polyglot-maven/blob/polyglot-0.4.8/polyglot-yaml/src/test/resources/snakeyaml/pom.yaml

There is a certain argument to be made for user ergonomy. Many developers are drawn to Gradle and friends, or to work with polyglot Maven, because they support a more concise syntax. This is not necessarily a contradiction with Maven's Goals!

I wished they‘d finally embrace polyglot maven https://github.com/takari/polyglot-maven. pom.yaml rule the world.

It seems merely adding a file to the .mvn directory will do as you wish: https://github.com/takari/polyglot-maven#usage

I have avoided that road because it's one more thing that is a snowflake in the very area where I don't want to blazing trails. But I have personally tried their approach before and can confirm it does work as advertised. I can't recall if IJ lost its mind over pulling a stunt like that, but arguably if it did, then filing a YouTrack is an appropriate next step