Maven Sucks

Tools like Maven make me want to quit the software industry before I die of frustration. I've wasted basically the last two days screwing around with problems related to Maven. In a nutshell, Maven does not provide a consistent or reliable build environment.

Modern software is not written from scratch; it's assembled from myriad components from other vendors, in much the same way that car manufacturers buy their parts (seats, brakes, wiper motors, radios) from other companies. And just like a car seat is itself made of springs and fabric and metal bits that come from yet other manufacturers, each software component may itself be assembled from other components.

Maven is a tool to help manage all the little pieces that fit together into a software product - to manage the fact that my product consists of components X, Y, and Z, which in turn require the presence of P, Q, R, and S, which in turn require A, B, and C; to fetch those components from wherever they come from if they're not already on my computer; and to make sure that the versions of these different components are all compatible.

But it sucks. Maven wants to update things without me asking, so that if I run a test twice in a row I don't necessarily get the same results. Maven wants to download things without me asking, so a task that took 15 seconds the last time might take a few minutes, or fail utterly (if I lose my network connection), leaving me in an unknown and inconsistent state where I can't build at all. And most frustratingly, Maven is itself highly modular, meaning that it's not all downloaded until it's needed, meaning that in the event of network trouble it can again fail utterly. Networks are not yet reliable enough for that to be okay.

Further, Maven seems to do a crappy job of understanding and resolving or reporting version conflicts. I'm extending some test code, that's supposed to exercise version 3.2.5 of product HappyWidget. The test code therefore tells Maven that it needs HappyWidget version 3.2.5. But the test code also needs OtherThing version 2.7.1; which needs FussyBit 2.0.1; which needs HappyWidget 3.1.2. Whoops! This is a version conflict. It would have been easy to fix, except that Maven didn't tell me there was a problem, it just silently deployed HappyWidget 3.1.2. So all along this test was actually testing HappyWidget 3.1.2. What's really scary is that when I uninstalled and then reinstalled everything, without explicitly making any changes in my dependencies, the behavior changed - now it's deploying 3.2.5, which is nice for my test but not so nice for the corresponding code that is supposed to test HappyWidget 3.1.2.

The first requirement of a build tool is that it should behave predictably. Maven fails.

It's late and I'm not going to spend more time saying all the hateful things that Maven has done to me in the last two days. I will blog in the future about what I think the solution to this should be.