Advice on packaging a Maven plugin

[Peter Collingbourne]

Hello,

We (I and Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan) are packaging a Maven plugin for
the Clojure language (clojure-maven-plugin).  Our preliminary packaging
is available at git://git.debian.org/pkg-java/clojure-maven-plugin.git

Our question relates to how to package those packages which depend
on clojure-maven-plugin.  Because maven plugins do not supply a
"debian" version, any package relying on clojure-maven-plugin
(essentially all packages written in Clojure that use Maven) will
need to specify a particular version of the plugin and will FTBFS
when a new version enters the archive.  AFAICT, every other maven
plugin in the archive has the same problem.  But due to the less
tightly coupled relationship between this plugin and its users,
a solution to this problem is more needed.

One solution to this problem is to use some makefile magic in the
dependent package's debian/rules file to extract the plugin's version
number and inject it into the pom.xml using a substitution variable.
But this would need to be done in every dependent package.

I am seeking the list's input on this or any other solution.

Thanks,
-- 
Peter