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I like Maven, I like Eclipse but, I think calling m2eclipse "first class support in the IDE" is a stretch...

When the plugin stops breaking projects I'll start using it again. For now, I'll continue using the Maven plugin "maven-eclipse-plugin" instead.

I don't want to be negative. I love that the plugin is being developed. I offers Kudos to the developers. I just think we should be honest when we describe the state of our tools.

Strange, m2eclipse is working well for me. What are your specific issues?

http://www.ademiller.com/blogs/tech/2008/06/it-works-on-my-machine-award/
:-)

willcode4beer, I am also confused. Can you please point me to the bug report for m2eclipse with details on the issue you referring to? If there is no bug report, can you please submit one, so we can actually fix it. See http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNGECLIPSE

Thank you in advance.

Don't know which bug, I'll try to find some time to build a reduced project to replicate the issue (finding time will be the difficult part). If I had a little more free time, I'd just fix and submit a patch. However, it appears related to: 714, 629, 713, and 679.

Basically, with a multi-module web project, the m2eclipse plugin breaks the dependencies so running on tomcat in eclipse fails. Either it tries to deploy the "provided" dependencies (which prevents start-up) or it creates broken dependencies that can't deploy. It is strange that the plugin creates one variable for Maven dependencies. It seems like there should be one variable for each scope. That way the correct classpath could be used for each situation (ie, don't add "test" and "provided" libs as Java EE Module Dependencies when running on the sever).

Trying to import the multi-module project as a Maven project works, except "run on server" fails (for the above reasons). As a web project, I'd rather be able to run the server from Eclipse than have top level pom visibility; so, the m2eclipse plugin is unused.

Separate issues: The GUI POM editor doesn't work at all (or even show up as an option) but, that's not really a big deal as, I prefer editing the XML anyway. It would also be nice if I could check a maven project out of CVS using Eclipse and have it work using the information in the POM but, that isn't there either (if I'm checking out a maven project why do I get a broken archetype dialog. It has a pom, there's no need for archetypes).

Thanks for the comments. I would also suggest to continue this discussion in m2eclipse mailing lists or in Eclipse news group at http://www.eclipse.org/newsportal/thread.php?group=eclipse.technology.m2e

From WTP-related issues you've mentioned, two of then don't have test projects, hence we can't reproduce them. You would really help m2eclipse developers even by providing test projects for those issues. Of course, patches are also appreciated. we have instructions for setting development environment on the wiki at http://docs.codehaus.org/display/M2ECLIPSE/Configuring+Development+Environment

Note that m2eclipse version 0.9.4 included extensions for the Eclipse XML editor to provide Ctrl-Space content assist. So, you open your poms using "Open with... / XML editor" action and can enjoy content assist for pom.xml.

The form-based pom editor will be available starting from 0.9.5. You can try the pom editor using 0.9.5 dev build that can be installed from update site at http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/update-dev/

The problem is finding the time to build test projects :-) I will try to set some time aside to do it.

One of the things I do like about Maven (esp over ant) is the schema, which means I can get auto-complete with any xml editor.
Editing a POM is something done so rarely that I really don't mind editing the XML.

I hope my comments didn't seem too negative. I'm a big fan of Maven (warts and all). I really do appreciate the work being done on m2eclipse. I just prefer to be honest about how things work.