Hi, I'm writing that in the context of some maintenance work in Eclipse m2e. Eclipse m2e likes to use the latest Maven release, but we identified (and shared it publicly on the bugtracker before the 3.6.0 release) that MNG-6311 was a risky change. We unfortunately didn't have the opportunity to prove our point back then, which probably didn't help our concerns to be taken into account seriously. Still, now we have more time for it, and we demonstrated with a JUnit test that MNG-6311, despite all the shiny effect of a performance improvement in some cases, actually introduces a severe regression that makes all downstream adopters keeping a ProjectBuilder instance for a long term usage in a context where pom files can change (like m2e does) are basically broken by the change as it will ignore modifications on pom files when resolving dependencies. The test case I attached to MNG-6350 shows that by reverting the commit introduced by MNG-6311, everything is back to green and modifications of pom files are properly taken into account. On MNG-6350, I've put some notes about what seems easily achievable after 1.5 day of work on this topic (which isn't much, especially for someone who never wrote a line of code for Maven so far), but I have the impression no proper fix can be easily reached (at least by me). So I'd like the Maven community to 1. help finding a solution for MNG-6350 before the next release, and 2. if no solution seems achievable for next release, consider reverting MNG-6311 so the downstream community can safely adopt it.
Note that this is part of a longer story of improving the state of m2e in general, both technically, in term of internal community and in term of interaction with the Maven project. We are aiming at making m2e able to work more and more closely from Maven snapshots and staging builds to report such issues earlier and have the opportunity to prevent regressions to happen in Maven. We'll probably share more messages about it in the next weeks/months. Cheers, -- Mickael Istria Eclipse IDE <https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/eclipse-packages/> developer, for Red Hat Developers <https://developers.redhat.com/>
