title: Share a maven assembly descriptor with resources in it
body: <p>I would like to create an assembly descriptor defining how my applications are uploaded on Nexus and in particular I would like those final packages to include a couple of startup scripts handy to run applications on different platforms.  Untill now I have always copied the assembly descritor and the startup template scripts from project to project, but now I would like to find a clever solution for the problem.</p>
  
  <p>In the documentation page of the maven-assembly-plugin I found an <a href="http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-assembly-plugin/examples/sharing-descriptors.html" rel="nofollow">example</a> showing how to share descriptors across multiple projects;  unfortunately it does not cover the case where one wants to include a <em>common</em> resource in the the distribution package but and after a couple of experiments I came to the conclusion it is impossible to do that:  to include a resource in the distribution file one has to specify the <em>path</em> of the resource (apparently it is not possible to link a resource contained within a jar).</p>
  
  <p>Additional solutions I have found so far try to use the <strong>ant</strong> or <strong>dependency</strong> plugins to unpack the jar containing the the assembly descritor and the script templates inside the build folder before packaging the application.</p>
  
  <p>Even if I can stick with the the solutions of the last paragraph, I am wondering if there is a clearer way to achieve that:  do I really need to use additional plugins for such a task?</p>