How do you use the maven-simian-plugin in Maven2?

Question

I'm looking for a Maven2 reporting plugin for Simian and the closest thing to such a reporting I found is this. The problem is, the documentation for it appears to be for Maven 1 instead. Why is a Maven 1 plugin stored in a Maven 2 repository? I suppose that means I can use it... but how to use? The site mentions reporting but if I don't have a src/main/site, does that mean I can't use it? I was kinda hoping for something like mvn simian:simian similar to mvn checkstyle:checkstyle and mvn pmd:pmd. I don't want to generate site just for the reports. Sites take too long to generate when all I want is a quite xml report.

Answer 1

The Simian plugin listed on central is actually for Maven 1 (if you inspect the contents you'll see a project.xml and a plugin.jelly). So that explains why it doesn't work. This is rubbish and should be removed in my opinion.

As far as I can make out there isn't a publically available Maven 2 plugin, this may have something to do with the licence (Simian isn't open source).

As an alternative, have a look at PMD's CPD plugin, it may not be as fully featured as simian but I know it works in a Maven 2 build and detects copypasta pretty well.

To configure PMD, add something like the following to your POM:

<reporting>
  <plugins>
    <plugin>
      <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
      <artifactId>maven-pmd-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>2.4</version>
    </plugin>
  </plugins>
</reporting>