Maven Compromised by Plugins

Every piece of software has its flaws... The important part is how the project is dealing with bugs.

Maven is fine

With Maven, the situation actually is good enough: there have been releases of 2.0.x branch 1-2 times per year, to fix bugs and provide new features or improvements. At the same time, the 2.1.0 branch appeared with a milestone and a final release six month later.

However, you would usually not want to switch your Maven build system to a new version too often. This is always risky since a new version of the "core" may cause unexpected results in any area of the build. A continuous integration engine helps to detect bugs, but you never know.

Fortunately, Maven is heavily based on plugins – which means if you encounter any issue with a specific Maven task, it's usually caused by the related plugin, not the Maven core. That's great, right? You just upgrade your POMs to use a new version of the particular plugin. Better isolation, fewer risks!

(Some) Plugins are not!

But... this assumes that there is a new version of the plugin available. Now imagine this: a plugin has a bug reported by the community, and there is a Jira issue for that. Some brave soul even attached a patch to fix the issue and others confirmed that it works for them. Thus, the new bugfix release could easily be built. But what happens? No new release. Nothing. Not even an alpha/beta version. Not even a comment explaining why. For months!

Here are just two examples we stumbled upon the last couple of weeks:

• Javadoc plugin: The report is not generated at all for multi-module project if run from parent level and using the recommended aggregate goal. Jira issue reported 2008/08/18, patch added 2008/09/22. No new release ever since.


• Checkstyle plugin: Current version does not work with Checkstyle 5.0 that started to appear on the stage last summer. Jira issue created 2008/10/28, along with a patch; another patch added 2009/03/27. No new release ever since.

Wow. How annoying is that? There is a major/blocking issue, and there is a patch available, but the plugin owners don't take the time or effort to create a new release?!? Why so? What else could the community do to help fixing the plugin?

This way, the plugins are compromising usability of Maven. IMHO, that's a serious issue...

So, what can you do?

If you don't want to continue waiting for a new plugin release, you have to build one on your own, for your "private use". That's quite easy, fortunately, and I'll probably post about that later.

However, this is actually not what a typical Maven user wants to do. The plugins should just do it right: release more often to fix their known bugs! You could increase the pressure a little bit by voting for the Jira issue or adding some comments, but my experiences are not too good ...