Automatically create a variables or append sub-directories to PATH

[fmarot]

Usually this plugin is used to extract a bunch of DLL into ./target/natives dir. But sometimes some libraries are complex and require multiple sub-path to be added to the PATH (or LD_LIBRARY_PATH).

If we created a convention that natives artifact would follow (a text file at the root of the zip or tar-gz ???), then we could automatically construct the PATH (or LD_LIBRARY_PATH) during the Maven build. And this variable could be used in the configuration of the exec-maven-plugin to run the program.

We could create the PATH variable but also new variables. Variables specific to some artifacts could be created according to what the text-file contains. For exemple, intel DLL redistributables must have MIC_LD_LIBRARY_PATH, for OpenOffice we must have UNO_PATH, ...

Such a convention would definitly make life easier for users.

[fmarot]

maybe the creation of variables would require, to be usefull, to make the maven-exec-plugin auto-discover some variables.
For exemple, this plugin could auto-detect variable NATIVEDEP* so that NATIVEDEP_OIVJHOME would add to the environement the OIVJHOME variable, NATIVEDEP_LD_LIBRARY_PATH would add LD_LIBRARY_PATH and so on.

Maybe this whole idea is only worth in conjonction with new features of the maven-exec-plugin...