I gave up using m2eclipse with Eclipse Ganymede. That’s not premature. I tried my best to figure out a way to use the plugin in a reliable way. However, that’s over now, I quit!
The plugin would be great and extremely useful if it worked. Really, I’d love to have this plugin as an everyday tool, helping me deliver software. It offers a very productive way to work with Maven in Eclipse, except that it brakes Eclipse in such an unbearable way that I cannot afford to think about using it anymore.
Initially I was using m2eclipse with an external Maven installation, instead of the embedded one. With this setup, I was facing many (and I mean MANY) NullPointerExceptions doing some Maven stuff in the IDE. It was impossible to work with that much errors, so I tried using the embedded Maven installation.
Initially it seemed like I was gonna be able to work without problems, but I was wrong. Instead of all the NullPointerExceptions, now Eclipse itself would crash hard when I used the POM editor. Adding a dependency, adding a new build plugin. I was frequently having Eclipse crashes doing this stuff.
I first thought that it could be just an issue in the “graphical” POM editor, so I tried using the simple XML editor. The errors kept occuring, and I got mad.
I could live with this problem if my Eclipse crashed 2 or 3 times a day. I’d gladly restart it, and keep working. However, facing Eclipse crashes every 5-10 minutes can make you crazy before you deliver any piece of software.
I am a man of faith, so I’ll try using it with Eclipse Europa and with minimal features, to see if it hangs on. I use this setup at work, and although it doesn’t work perfectly, at least it stands a whole day without crashing.
Maven is such a widespread Java tool. It’s far from unanymous among developers, but it’s a very valuable tool for me. I think it deserves much better tooling support, so I hope this Ganymede mess is fixed someday. But maybe the Eclipse ecosystem got so complex that it’s becoming impossible to keep everything stable.
I’ve tried using Netbeans before, but I couldn’t be nearly as productive as I am with Eclipse. So please Eclipse, please don’t let me down!
Grande Brunão, note que o Ganymede tem uma estrutura de pacotes diferentes das versões anteriores, esse problema que você está encontrando pode ser relacionado a isso. Abs.
Grande Curió!
É verdade, essa versão é diferente mesmo. Infelizmente, na estrutura antiga alguns plugins só não funcionavam. Agora, eles quebram o Eclipse na hora. Eita software “muderno”!
Bruno, I am sorry to hear that m2eclipse didn’t work for your project. On the other hand, it is really sad that you decided to write a bile blog instead of informing project team about these issues and helping us to investigate them. Your blog post would be more helpful even if you just linked corresponding bug numbers.
Anyway, if you ever change your mind about this, there is a wiki page that has few hints about what information can be provided to make it easier to investigate issues. See http://docs.codehaus.org/display/M2ECLIPSE/Reporting+Issues
Hi Eugene, you’re right, I’m sorry about that. As I said, I really like the plugin features, but was extremely frustrated about the instability I faced, that made it impossible to work in Ganymede.
I’m using it successfully in Eclipse Europa, so I’m now leaning to think this is much more an Eclipse issue than m2eclipse’s. I use to report issues to the projects. I did this with a lot of open source projects I used. However, the errors I was facing happened in such a variety of situations that I wasn’t able to properly define a sequence of steps that led me to errors.
This weekend I’ll setup the same environment again and try to collect as much information as possible to help the team. I’ll get back to you soon.
Hi Bruno!
For me the most annoying bug is:
http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNGECLIPSE-823
Not only is the m2 annoying, it’s outright wasteful. I can’t count the number of hours I’ve wasted staring at the m2 console starting up on seemingly random intervals and taking over. I don’t have the luxury of switching it off, since it’s a team standard, but it has easily wasted 10% of any one of my working days.
I understand that you need to be constructive and list the issues, but the plain fact is, it’s just not ready for prime-time, and it’s claimed to be the most advanced maven2 plugin for eclipse.
I’ve been using Eclipse since 2001 and I remember the reason I moved towards it from Netbeans was that it didn’t have the annoying habit of stopping me from getting to my IDE at random intervals (that, and general bloat (winkwinkwink)).
The situation is so bad that I find myself randomly going to Textpad just to be able to carry on working while m2 decides to disallow me from using eclipse.
These things never-ever happened using the built-in ANT plugin. I understand how m2 is different to ANT, but if it’s this detrimental to my productivity, it should have never been released as a “stable” eclipse plugin, especially if there’s noone responsible behind it with their own money.
@Bill,
I know what you mean, because things were very frustrating and annoying for me by the time I wrote this. However, i guess it’s not m2eclipse’s fault by itself.
When I was experiencing these issues, I was able to find a stable setup with m2eclipse using Eclipse Europa, and worked with this setup for a long time. m2eclipse was still unstable under Ganymede, but I had no problem keeping Europa, so that’s what I did.
Recently I started using Ganymede’s second update release (3.4.2) and m2eclipse is working just fine, with the exact same build I had when it was unstable. Seeing this, we can probably conclude that something in Ganymede’s core caused the problems, but it’s been solved by now.
It should be very hard for the plugin developers to handle some refactorings in Eclipse architecture, specially because this is an independent open source project. Well, what matters the most is that it’s working fine now, so I’m able to enjoy Maven within Eclipse. I hope you’re able to find a stable setup as well, good luck.
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