I was mailing on a different list and someone asked me to post problems
I was having with m2eclipse here. The mail said there was a newer
version however, so this post may be a waste of space.
I have been using m2eclipse with Eclipse 3.1 for some time. I am
upgrading to Eclipse 3.3 now that Europa is out, and so am trying to
work out the "right" way to get things going with Eclipse and
multi-module projects.
I have had a lot of problems with m2elipse. When it works, its great.
Frequently however it got the version numbers messed up of
dependencies. For example, I had a multi-module project where all
modules were at version 0.1.0. However m2eclipse reported that it
failed to resolve a dependency for version 2.4.1 of one of the modules.
The number 2.4.1 did not appear in *any* of my pom.xml files - it must
have been some transitive dependency version number that got substituted
in by accident. Worse, its hard to reliably repeat the problems.
Sometimes I can spend half an how enable/disable maven, F5 to refresh,
svn update, exit/restart Eclipse all to no effect, then suddenly for no
apparent reason it starts working fine. So I don't have a repeatable
test case - it was just flaky.
I have had other different problems where again, it seemed to get the
wrong version number of dependencies. For example, the pom.xml file if
it specifies a specific version that version should be the one used.
Sometimes however it seemed to use the version requested by a transitive
dependency.
The m2eclipse plugin also seemed to frequently have trouble downloading
artifacts. Frequently I would have to go to the command line, do a mvn
compile command to download the dependencies, then Eclipse would be
happier. When it got the version numbers wrong, I would have to edit a
pom file to point to that version number, do the mvn compile command to
download it, then set the pom.xml file back to the version number I
wanted. This would get m2eclipse over some problems it had, and when it
had a problem it appeared to stop looking for more dependencies. So the
dependency list would frequently be truncated.
But all of the above might be completely useless/out of date as its not
using the latest build.
I was also asked to describe what I want with m2eclipse. My goal is to
have a large multi-module project where each module has its own,
independent, dependency list. Two modules (e.g. WAR files) might
legitimately want different versions of artifacts. The newer version
might support this.
Having all the code in one project that gets compiled up as one unit is
both good and bad. Its good as svn commands to do tags etc cover the
whole project easily. It can be annoying as the project gets larger
however as I have to recompile everything, even if just working more in
one module. As the project size increases, this is starting to become
more of an issue.
The alternative to m2eclipse that I have been trying to get work
(without success so far) is to use mvn eclipse:eclipse with nested
projects. That is, I want a root level project for doing global svn
commands, plus independent dependency lists per module. mvn
eclipse;eclipse does the dependency stuff per module nicely - but I
don't have a global project for doing svn stuff via the UI. Eclipse 3.2
and 3.3 seem to allow nested projects, but the SVN plugins I am not sure
are quite there yet. Subclipse has a few problems (being addressed I
believe). Subversive I have not had much luck with - trying with
Eclipse 3.3 had problems as it was looking for Mylar instead of Mylyn.
I am sure these problems will get sorted out over time.
Anyway, I hope this was of use to someone. This is not a request for
anything to be done. It might be the latest m2eclipse plugin works
better. I might give it another whirl. I have just subscribed to this
list (no acknowledgment back yet) so I will try to keep an eye on this
thread (but I often get swamped with work).
While the above might seem rather negative, when m2eclipse did work, it
worked great. Even when it played up, we still stuck with it because it
was so useful. But with nested projects now in Eclipse, I am trying to
work out if there is a more reliable way of doing things. I have not
seen a good solution yet that has worked reliably for me.
Thanks!
Alan
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