Leiningen 'lein install' without writing pom.xml?

Question

I've been contributing to a project in which there's a fixed pom.xml, but I tend to modify project.clj, temporarily, for various purposes. Most of the time, Leiningen seems to ignore pom.xml, but lein install and lein deploy rewrite pom.xml. Is this necessary to Leiningen's functioning? If not, can I stop it? Haven't found anything about this in the online docs yet.

It's not a big problem, but I'd rather not deal with having to restore the official pom.xml in my project before doing a 'git commit', for example.

EDIT: I discovered a solution for my situation, which is to create a 'checkouts' directory with a link to the other project. This causes the other project to be pulled in, without creating a new jar. However, I'm still curious: Does Leiningen need to create pom.xml e.g. for lein install? Why? I'd like to understand the process.

Answer 1

I'm unsure of whether lein install can be run without generating a pom.xml.

The reason it generates a pom is that leiningen uses maven to grab all the dependencies. In fact, maven is able to get dependencies from clojars and leiningen uses it for the clojure dependencies as well as the java ones. Maven requires a pom.xml to specify repository locations and other configuration necessary to run javac (or any other build commands) in addition to a groupId and artifactId to deploy your library to a (potentially local) repository

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Another possible workaround to your issue is to use changelists (specifically, if using tortoiseSVN, I'd use the ignore-on-commit changelist) to ignore your pom.xml in most situations commitwise. I believe this stackoverflow answer may assist you with how to do that in git.