[m2e-users] war artifacts, glassfish, m2e - a neverending painful story

[Kristian Rink <kawazu428@xxxxxxxxx>]

Folks;

once in a while, I come back with the same issue, and over and over again, it 
is utterly painful. :( So, this time: Had to re-install Eclipse 4.2 on a new 
machine. Kept my workspace folder in place, installed all the plugins I used 
to have before (Oracle Glassfish tools, JBoss tools, Spring IDE and a few 
others). Saw that the workspace configuration, application servers configured in 
there, ..., were still in place. Maven building my war artifacts also works.

However, again, deploying a war artifact to a local Glassfish from within the 
IDE is dearly broken. Building the war artifact via maven and deploying it 
using the Glassfish administration console just works. However, in Eclipse at 
first I had to figure out that, despite I kept my workspace untouched, 
"something" messed up my "Deployment Assembly" configuration, again including 
source files but omitting the maven dependencies which have to go to WEB-
INF/lib - I am almost used to manually setting this right, even though I have 
no idea why this setting is being reset after re-installing the IDE - 
shouldn't this be something to live inside the workspace / project 
configuration? Same way, other settings (such as Java 1.6 compiler compliance) 
seem to have "disappeared" from the project configuration. Maybe some other 
settings, too - so far I see peculiar errors I have never seen before whenever 
trying to deploy the artifact to the local Glassfish server, but as well, using 
the tooling in Eclipse, I don't see any way to figure out _what_ actually does 
get deployed, _where_ these files live and _how_ the IDE determines what should 
be deployed and what shouldn't. The glassfish-web.xml sometimes seems to be 
evaluated (though not all the time). Changes in the pom.xml also seem to be 
honoured just sometimes, sometimes requiring "just" a redeploy of the app to 
produce a different error, sometimes require a restart of the application 
server to change anything.

At the moment, I am running out of ideas. So to ask: Is there _anything_, 
documentation or a tutorial, a set of FAQs, ... to figure out how on earth to 
get such a setup (maven, glassfish, Eclipse) to _reliably_ work even after an 
IDE re-installation without spending hours and hours trying to track down 
project configuration errors? 

Any input on this greatly appreciated. :)
Thanks in advance,
Kristian