Activate Maven profile if another profile is not activated

Profile x will be the the only active profile when you call mvn ... -P x. Reason from the maven documentation:

  Profiles can be explicitly specified using the -P CLI option.
  This option takes an argument that is a comma-delimited list of profile-ids to
use. When this option is specified, no profiles other than those specified in
the option argument will be activated.

Here’s a workaround:

<profiles>
    <profile>
        <id>default</id>
        <activation>
            <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
            <property>
                <name>!specific</name>
            </property>
        </activation>
    </profile>
    <profile>
        <id>specific</id>
        <activation>
            <property>
                <name>specific</name>
            </property>
        </activation>
    </profile>
    <profile>
        <id>x</id>
        <activation>
            <property>
                <name>x</name>
            </property>
        </activation>
    </profile>
    <profile>
        <id>y</id>
        <activation>
            <property>
                <name>y</name>
            </property>
        </activation>
    </profile>
</profiles>

The commands:

mvn ...                        // default
mvn ... -Dspecific             // specific Profile         (no default!)
mvn ... -Dx                    // default + x
mvn ... -Dx -Dy                // default + x + y
mvn ... -Dx -Dspecific         // x + specific Profile     (no default!)
mvn ... -Dx -Dspecific -Dy     // x + specific Profile + y (no default!)

Execute mvn ... help:active-profiles to get the list of the ids of active profiles.