What is a classifier in SBT

Question

What is meant under the term classifiers? Is it comes from Jars? For example in sbt-assembly plugin:

artifact in (Compile, assembly         


        

Answer 1

In addition to @gourlaysama's answer, see Publishing:

Published artifacts

By default, the main binary jar, a sources jar, and a API documentation jar are published. You can declare other types of artifacts to publish and disable or modify the default artifacts. See the Artifacts page for details.

and Artifacts:

Defining custom artifacts

In addition to configuring the built-in artifacts, you can declare other artifacts to publish. Multiple artifacts are allowed when using Ivy metadata, but a Maven POM file only supports distinguishing artifacts based on classifiers and these are not recorded in the POM.