Why Maven is like Jiu-Jitsu

I recently started practicing Jiu-Jitsu. The state of doing jui-jitsu is called "rolling" because the two opponents grapple with each other, usually on the ground, flowing from one attack or defense to the next so that it looks like they are rolling around. This goes on until one of them yells in pain and taps the ground or anything else he can reach to signal he gives up. When it's time to roll in my school, the colored belts sit on one side of the room and take on whatever white belts walk up to them. At the end of a 3-minute round (in which the white belt has usually tapped at least once and often several times), the colored belts sit back down and wait for the next round and next opponent. They are usually not breathing very hard. The white belts go back to their side and collapse on the ground, panting heavily, hurting in previously unknown ways, wondering what just happened, trying to figure out what they can learn from the experience, and very glad that they gets to rest for a round. The colored belts often give encouraging reminders - "Relax. Don't use so much force. Follow the natural flow where there is least resistance. Read, study others, and practice. Let your muscles learn the vocabulary so that the moves are automatic. It will come in time."

My group at work recently moved our common utilities and tools projects to maven. We also converted one of our major products - an ETL framework that runs as an ear under JBoss. This includes the core components, about a dozen extension modules, third party information extraction tools (GATE), a war for monitoring the system, several standard "feeds" used by our major customers for their primary workflows (ingesting files, rss feeds, and data from other DBs, replicating data across a mesh network, extracting GIS information to store in SDE, etc), and an installer. None of us had used maven before outside of small test projects (i.e. single jar files). Oh, and we also decided to move from our existing AntInstaller to one based on IzPack.

Now the person who has taken on this Sisyphean task for the past couple of months is on vacation for 10 days, and I am pounding my head against the wall trying to make tweaks to various packages and the installer and cut a release using the maven release plugin. I tweak some code in one module, compile, run a test in another module, and WHY DON'T YOU WORK YOU #$$%^! THING? Oh, ya. Run mvn install to get the change into the repository. I may think of things as being in the same overall project, but maven doesn't know the code is right next door. It wants what's in the repository. Now lets get the package right so it excludes a temporary directory that may get created during debugging. I can do this in ant easy enough, surely I can do it in... WHY DOES IT KEEP GETTING COPIED OVER TO THE #%&@@# STAGING DIRECTORY?!!! Oh, if I turn filtering on, exclude settings don't work as expected. I need two resource nodes copying the same directory.

Don't even get me started on the release plugin itself.

I end the day exhausted, breathing heavy (from effort and swearing too much), wondering why certain parts build the way they do, trying to remember what I learned from the experience, and strongly wishing I could tap out. And the words of the colored belts come back to me -

Relax. Study others. Learn the vocabulary. Learn the path of least resistance. Don't try to force it; there is likely an easier way. There are moves, I mean plugins, that you have not even heard of yet that will give you great power. It will come in time.