Activate Maven profile if another profile is not activated

Question

The question is related to Maven: Only activate profile A if profile B is not activated?, but it's more specific.

If I type one of the following:

mvn clean install -PspecificProfile
mvn clean install -Dsmth -PspecificProfile
mvn clean install -Dsmth -PspecificProfile,anotherProfile

then I want to activate the specificProfile profile. (+the additional specified profiles)

If I type anything else like:

mvn install
mvn clean install
mvn clean install -Dsmth
mvn clean install -Dsmth -PanotherProfile
mvn clean install -Dsmth -PdefaultProfile
mvn clean install -Dsmth -PdefaultProfile,anotherProfile

then I want to activate the defaultProfile(+the additional specified profiles).

Idea:

if ( specific profile P is used via command line ) {
    activate P;
} else {
    activate the default profile;
}
activate other specified profiles;

Examples:

mvn ...                          // default
mvn ... -PspecificProfile        // specificProfile           (no default!)
mvn ... -Px                      // default + x
mvn ... -Px,y                    // default + x + y
mvn ... -Px,specificProfile      // x + specificProfile       (no default!)
mvn ... -Px,specificProfile,y    // x + specificProfile + y   (no default!)

---

I tried to do something like this (in pom.xml):

<profile>
    <id>defaultProfile</id>
    <activation>
        <property>!x</property>
    </activation>
    ...
</profile>
<profile>
    <id>specificProfile</id>
    <properties>
        <x>true</x>
    </properties>
    ...
</profile>

but it doesn't work.

Solution

Profile x will be the the only active profile when you call mvn ... -P x. Reason from the maven documentation:

  Profiles can be explicitly specified using the -P CLI option.
  This option takes an argument that is a comma-delimited list of profile-ids to
use. When this option is specified, no profiles other than those specified in
the option argument will be activated.

Here's a workaround:

<profiles>
    <profile>
        <id>default</id>
        <activation>
            <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
            <property>
                <name>!specific</name>
            </property>
        </activation>
    </profile>
    <profile>
        <id>specific</id>
        <activation>
            <property>
                <name>specific</name>
            </property>
        </activation>
    </profile>
    <profile>
        <id>x</id>
        <activation>
            <property>
                <name>x</name>
            </property>
        </activation>
    </profile>
    <profile>
        <id>y</id>
        <activation>
            <property>
                <name>y</name>
            </property>
        </activation>
    </profile>
</profiles>

The commands:

mvn ...                        // default
mvn ... -Dspecific             // specific Profile         (no default!)
mvn ... -Dx                    // default + x
mvn ... -Dx -Dy                // default + x + y
mvn ... -Dx -Dspecific         // x + specific Profile     (no default!)
mvn ... -Dx -Dspecific -Dy     // x + specific Profile + y (no default!)

Execute mvn ... help:active-profiles to get the list of the ids of active profiles.