Publish BEAST 3 artifacts to Maven Central

[alexeid]

Problem

BEAST 3 artifacts could be published to GitHub Packages, but this requires authentication (a GitHub PAT with read:packages scope) even for public repositories. This is a barrier for external package developers who need to depend on beast-base, beast-pkgmgmt, or beast-fx.

Proposal

Publish BEAST 3 artifacts to Maven Central under the namespace io.github.compevol. Maven Central is free for open source projects and requires no authentication to pull dependencies.

Namespace

Register io.github.compevol via the Central Portal. Verification is done by creating a temporary repo in the CompEvol GitHub org with a verification key as its name.

Artifact coordinates

Current (GitHub Packages)	Proposed (Maven Central)
beast:beast-base	io.github.compevol:beast-base
beast:beast-pkgmgmt	io.github.compevol:beast-pkgmgmt
beast:beast-fx	io.github.compevol:beast-fx
beast:beagle	io.github.compevol:beagle
beast:colt	io.github.compevol:colt

Requirements

Maven Central requires:

• Sources JAR and javadoc JAR for each artifact
• GPG signatures on all artifacts
• POM metadata: name, description, license, SCM URL, developer info

Benefits

• No authentication needed — any developer can add beast-base as a dependency and it just works
• Standard tooling — Maven Central is the default repository, no <repository> block needed in POMs
• Reliability — Maven Central has an SLA and CDN; GitHub Packages has had outages
• Discoverability — packages are searchable on https://central.sonatype.com/

Migration path

1. Register io.github.compevol namespace
2. Add maven-source-plugin, maven-javadoc-plugin, and maven-gpg-plugin to the build
3. Update groupId from beast to io.github.compevol across all POMs
4. Set up CI to publish to Maven Central on release tags
5. Update external packages (morph-models, beast-package-skeleton) to use new coordinates
6. Keep GitHub Packages as a secondary/snapshot repository if desired