or get rid of pomExtra and provide a dsl for it

pomExtras is a pretty blunt tool, but I'm not sure if sbt should be validate the pom by default. Perhaps this could be a community ticket for an sbt plugin to validate it.

well since publish is part of sbt I think it should be in the core of sbt

test is part of sbt, but sbt doesn't come built in with scalacheck..

It's also about adding another/more dependencies..

Also an sbt plugin could eventually be folded into sbt.

Or we could add it as a feature, off by default, or on by default with a flag to disable it..

An easier, partial solution, at least for the magneticio case, is that instead of building the pom from sbt settings first, and then appending pomExtra, you start with pomExtra and then you append nodes in the XML. So when you generate the XML for the licenses key, for instance, if the licenses node exists your append in it.

Would a Java dependency to Maven Model Builder be acceptable, or would an implementation need to be Scala in order to be acceptable?

Does anyone know if XSD validation would suffice?