Alexandre,
Now the technicalities are out of the way, about the actual solution you propose :
- first of all, unzip is done only once, unless the source zip changed, in that case it's unzipped again. so there's no performance overhead here
- performance overhead could occur while scanning the unzipped folder to determine what's to be published, I grant you that :-)
- now if we serve these unzipped folders directly, we lose maven-war-plugin's inclusion/exclusion mechanism. It may be a problem for some.
- I'm aware of some issues with Tomcat's "serve without publishing" feature, which doesn't support the overlay components for some reason.
- In any case I don't believe naively serving the unzipped folders is the *proper* solution. I may revisit my opinion but I need to spend more time investigating the issue (and please attach a proper patch so I can review the diffs).
The whole overlay support in m2e-wtp is rather experimental. so things could be handled completely differently in the future. I'm not excluding anything just yet.
Unfortunately, I don't think I'll be able to spend some quality time with your problem before at least mid-august.
Regards,
Fred Bricon