properties that are not being resolved

I stumbled over some rather strange behaviour regarding properties. It
seems properties generated by one plugin are not always resolved for other
plugins and I can't figure out why.

I use a plugin to make info about the git branch available in the
properties so it can be passed to other plugins. The particular plugin
does not seem important, but I've included it here for sake of completeness:

<plugin>
<groupId>com.code54.mojo</groupId>
<artifactId>buildversion-plugin</artifactId>
<version>1.0.3</version>
<configuration>
<tstamp_format>yyyy.MM.dd HH:mm</tstamp_format>
</configuration>
<executions>
<execution>
<goals>
<goal>set-properties</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>

But when I referenced the properties set by the plugin in an env entry for
the maven ear plugin, the properties were not resolved at all:

<envEntries>
<env-entry>
<description>Middleware build information</description>
<env-entry-name>java:app/env/sw-version</env-entry-name>
<env-entry-type>java.lang.String</env-entry-type>
<env-entry-value>${build-commit} @ ${build-tstamp} built on
${maven.build.timestamp}</env-entry-value>
</env-entry>
</envEntries>

Just to be sure, I used the latest maven and tried both version 2.9 of the
plugin and the latest from the repo with the same result.

The only way I managed to fix this was to patch the maven-ear-plugin
itself, adding the following code in GenerateApplicationXmlMojo.execute():

// Fix env variable substitutions
Properties props = project.getProperties();
PlexusConfiguration[] entries = envEntries.getChildren();
if (entries != null) {
for (PlexusConfiguration entry : entries) {
if ("env-entry".equals(entry.getName())) {
PlexusConfiguration[] envEntryChildren = entry.getChildren();
if (envEntryChildren != null) {
for (PlexusConfiguration envEntryChild : envEntryChildren) {

envEntryChild.setValue(StrSubstitutor.replace(envEntryChild.getValue(),
props));

Then it worked just fine, but I don't understand why this is necessary. I
thought whatever called the plugin was supposed to have done the variable
substitution already. So clearly the properties were present at the time
of executing the plugin, but they werent being automaticly substituted.

To add to the confusion, using ${project.version} in the env-entry-value
was resolved just fine, but just not the properties coming from another
plugin despite the plugins being run in the correct order.

To further add to the confusion, I then used maven ant-run plugin, echoing
the values of properties which worked just fine (!)

While I solved the problem for me by making a locally patched version of
the ear plugin, it's not really a solution I favour, so I hope someone can
provide a better and more permanent fix.

Regards,
Henrik Gram