As we’ve seen in this chapter, the Maven Assembly plugin offers quite
a bit of potential for creating custom archive formats. While the
details of these assembly archives can be complex, they certainly
don’t have to be in all cases - as we saw with built-in assembly
descriptors. Even if your aim is to include your project’s
dependencies and selected project files in some unique, archived
directory structure, writing a custom assembly descriptor doesn’t have
to be an arduous task.
Assemblies are useful for a wide array of applications, but are most
commonly used as application distributions of various sorts. And,
while there are many different ways to use the Assembly plugin, using
standardized assembly-descriptor artifacts and avoiding moduleSets
when creating distributions containing binaries are two sure ways to
avoid problems.
