m2eclipse is the most unstable Eclipse plugin I’ve ever used
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!
November 17th, 2008 at 9:25 am
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.
November 17th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
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”!
November 28th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
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
November 28th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
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.
November 29th, 2008 at 10:15 am
Hi Bruno!
For me the most annoying bug is:
http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNGECLIPSE-823