The Apache Maven project just announced the next version (2.7) of the Maven Eclipse plugin. This is the plugin that generates the .classpath and .project files.
All well and good. Except that version 2.6 introduced at least one new massive bug – it puts the JRE at the end of the project classpath, instead of at the start. This means that, due to some projects out there doing stupid shit liking including JDK classes, you can get code breakages (e.g. you use generic collections, but this bug causes you to compile against the 1.4 Collection API). This bug is rated as ‘CRITICAL’ on their own issue tracker. It was caused by a patch for a ‘MINOR’ issue.
This bug is not fixed in the new 2.7 version.
Why, Maven developers? Why? Why are you releasing any new versions yet? According to your JIRA instance, you have 1 BLOCKER – introduced in 2.6 – and 14 CRITICAL bugs, going back as far as 2.0. In 2.7, you “fixed” one CRITICAL bug – by calling it a duplicate of a bug that was only MAJOR.
I know, I know – it’s open source, it’s free, and you get what you pay for. But there is no excuse for this. Those priority levels are meant to reflect the urgency felt by the project team. If they really feel an issue is a BLOCKER, they shouldn’t release. If they feel an issue is CRITICAL, they shouldn’t be working on trivial issues. If they don’t feel that these issues are CRITICAL, they should change the status.
And, in the meantime, I’m staying on 2.5.1.
Software is too expensive to build cheaply.... 