[m2e-users] m2e is unusable

[Pino Silvaggio <pino.silvaggio@xxxxxxxxx>]

I am working hard to resolve all the issues our developers encounter.

Main problem is that none of our ~70 projects import without a bunch of  
error markers. I don't understand how this is good. It's simply 
unacceptable. It's warning kinda of an error but not really... Sure it's 
fun to know that in fact m2e doesn't know what to do with some plugin. 
However, I don't care, I just want the IDE to be useful and not stand in 
my way.

We use Eclipse and NetBeans (Matisse, GUI stuff). In NetBeans 7.0.1 there
are very few complaints. People using Eclipse have simply reverted back 
to the 0.12.x plugin.

Main complaints:

1) unsupported plugins and goals
2) changing the configuration of a plugin in the pom.xml results in a 
manual update configuration ??? Why ??? Seriously... What other option 
is there ?
3) error markers
4) simple things that work in CLI don't or half-work in Eclipse

I made a m2e-dependency-connector supporting the unpack and copy goals.

It seems to work fine when the ArtifactItems are not in the workspace
but doesn't work when they are. This is because the resolved artifacts
paths are simply a directory in the workspace and therefore the copy or 
unpack
can not be executed. In fact, the resolved artifact (ArtifactItem) is 
the directory pointing to target/classes of that project in the workspace...

If I look at how Intellij or NetBeans, they actually resolves to the 
artifacts in the target directory, i.e.: target/project-1.0.jar

All these limitations are, in my opinion, dubious design choices.