Does maven-publish have any way to write an arbitrary filename (e.g. a Python wheel) to the remote?

Without having it in the metadata, not even the Gradle module metadata? Add it as explicit

artifact(...)

to the publication. But most often it is better to define a feature variant, so that a Gradle consumer can resolve it using attribute-aware resolution

artifact()

seems to rename the file unconditionally

I do not think there is an official supported way of doing this, but there is an internal API thats already known to be used elsewhere...

org.gradle.api.publish.maven.internal.publication.MavenPublicationInternal#publishWithOriginalFileName

Ah, right, only the extension and classifier will survive, the rest is renamed to Maven Repository standard

<artifact>-<version>

gradle native plugin does this:

private void addPublicationsFromVariants(final Project project, final SoftwareComponentContainer components) {
    project.getPluginManager().withPlugin("maven-publish", plugin -> {
        components.withType(PublicationAwareComponent.class, component -> {
            project.getExtensions().configure(PublishingExtension.class, publishing -> {
                final ComponentWithVariants mainVariant = component.getMainPublication();
                publishing.getPublications().create("main", MavenPublication.class, publication -> {
                    MavenPublicationInternal publicationInternal = (MavenPublicationInternal) publication;
                    publicationInternal.getPom().getCoordinates().getArtifactId().set(component.getBaseName());
                    publicationInternal.from(mainVariant);
                    publicationInternal.publishWithOriginalFileName();
                });

I also tried with

base {
    archivesName.set("foo")
}

and

from(components["java"])

still no luck to get anything but the standard names in the repo 😕

hmm maybe it only works if you create your own software component? (with variants?) It has to work for the native plugin somehow..

Or in short, noone should really use that 😄

well if there would be a better way to support arbitrary filenames...

Probably by not using

maven-publish

? 🤷‍♂️

Ahh yes thats possible, in that case it "works" only if downloaded through gradle... so if you are downloading using gradle you can try to use this internal option, otherwise I think you have to unfurtuanatelly abandon maven-publish and write your own uploader...

Even when downloaded through Gradle, you also cannot simply use

artifact(...)

then, because that is exactly what it says, just uploads the artifact with that classifier and extension but does not contain any metadata. Because of that it should usually never be done. You really need to model the file then for example by adding a variant for it so that it will be part of the GMM.