Why does anybody think that Maven is the holy grail? These days wherever you go you find these installations instructions: "Just grab the source and enter mvn install". Guess what: most of the times it doesn't work!
I know it might be great if you happen to be the developer of that specific project. But if you are an ordinary user of some library you just what to grab the binary build with some source attached and that's it. How hard can it be to do a build once in a while and put it on a website?
// Wrote this after spending 2 hours trying to build some stupid library.
-- Edit 18.07.2007
Yesterday I chatted with two of my colleagues about Maven. And both have read this post and telling me that I hate Maven. This is not the case. Although I don't really love Maven, I don't particularly hate it. What I do hate are libraries that require some sort of build system to get you going. An in the past couple of months everybody seems to build with Maven. But if I want to try out something you just want to grab a jar. So please: Don't let your users have to build something!