+1 Thanks Benson, for putting it so succinctly. My Mahout life with
Eclipse began to deteriorate when we adopted Maven and as we have taken
more advantage of its features it has gotten worse. It is almost
unusable now. Your description of the cause fits the symptoms perfectly.
I think I will invest some more time in IntelliJ.
On 12/4/11 4:11 PM, Benson Margulies wrote:
This problem is not of our making.
M2Eclipse is an ambitious effort. It's been pushed out into the public
eye well before it is stable or mature for all but the simplest cases.
At the same time, the maven-eclipse-plugin is a near-orphan.
The state of these two items is a symptom of a fundamental difference
between Eclipse on the one hand, and NetBeans and Intellij on the
others.
NB and IJ both work in the principle that the IDE's job is to launch a
build tool and then present the results of its output. Eclipse's
principle is to *be* a build tool. Unfortunately, it has never been a
practical tool for automated, command-line, builds. So everyone who
loves it as an IDE is stuck with finding some way to sync it up with
the underlying build tool of their choice.
The m-e-p's approach is to try to configure Eclipse to match maven.
However, this is a big of a mug's game, as there is an unbounded
collection of maven plugins, and no modularity for asking them to
deliver Eclipse-friendly results.
M2e's approach is to absorb Maven as an Eclipse builder, partially
replacing the native builder. This is a titanic effort. It's a wonder
that it works at all.
As individuals, we choose our IDE. As a project, the best we can do is
try to maintain support for several of them. We can keep maintaining
support for m-e-p, and try to tune the poms to be more workable with
m2e on any given day.
