Maven Plugins: Upgrade with Care!

Upgrading Maven Plugins: Tips and Issues

After having shown the list of current Maven plugin versions in my previous post, now I'm going to share my experiences with upgrading. Just like expected, some of the new plugins did not work out of the box or required some changes in configuration:

maven-checkstyle-plugin

We have used version 2.3 previously which is based on Checkstyle 4.4. In contrast, plugin version 2.4 is eventually built on top of Checkstyle 5 which better supports Java 5 language features (I wrote a post on that issue). The configuration is not fully compatible, so you would have to upgrade it.

maven-javadoc-plugin

Starting with version 2.6, JavaDoc plugin can detect the Java API link for the current build. This did not work for us (probably due to missing proxy configuration), so we had to switch it off by setting detectJavaApiLink property to false. See plugin site.

taglist-maven-plugin

The configuration of tags has changed and is now a bit more extensive. Old format (using tags element) is still supported, but deprecated. See plugin documentation.

findbugs-maven-plugin

I have used version 2.2 which was the most recent one when changing the POM. However, this yielded some strange errors during site generation. This is the strack trace:

Generating "FindBugs Report" report.
  Plugin Artifacts to be added ->...
  AuxClasspath is ->D:\Profiles\Default User\.m2\repository\org\apache\maven\reporting\maven-reporting-impl\2.0\maven-reporting-impl-2.0.jar;...
[java] Exception in thread "main" java.io.FileNotFoundException: D:\builds\...\User\.m2\repository\...\maven-reporting-impl-2.0.jar;D:\Profiles\Default (The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect)
[java]  at java.util.zip.ZipFile.open(Native Method)
[java]  at java.util.zip.ZipFile.<init>(ZipFile.java:114)
[java]  at java.util.zip.ZipFile.<init>(ZipFile.java:131)
[java]  at edu.umd.cs.findbugs.classfile.impl.ZipFileCodeBase.<init>(ZipFileCodeBase.java:53)
[java]  at edu.umd.cs.findbugs.classfile.impl.ZipCodeBaseFactory.countUsingZipFile(ZipCodeBaseFactory.java:92)
[java]  at edu.umd.cs.findbugs.classfile.impl.ZipCodeBaseFactory.makeZipCodeBase(ZipCodeBaseFactory.java:46)
[java]  at edu.umd.cs.findbugs.classfile.impl.ClassFactory.createFilesystemCodeBase(ClassFactory.java:97)
[java]  at edu.umd.cs.findbugs.classfile.impl.FilesystemCodeBaseLocator.openCodeBase(FilesystemCodeBaseLocator.java:75)
[java]  at edu.umd.cs.findbugs.classfile.impl.ClassPathBuilder.processWorkList(ClassPathBuilder.java:564)
[java]  at edu.umd.cs.findbugs.classfile.impl.ClassPathBuilder.build(ClassPathBuilder.java:195)
[java]  at edu.umd.cs.findbugs.FindBugs2.buildClassPath(FindBugs2.java:584)
[java]  at edu.umd.cs.findbugs.FindBugs2.execute(FindBugs2.java:181)
[java]  at edu.umd.cs.findbugs.FindBugs.runMain(FindBugs.java:348)
[java]  at edu.umd.cs.findbugs.FindBugs2.main(FindBugs2.java:1057)
[java] Java Result: 1

As you can see, we are using Windows default for local Maven repository (D:\Profiles\Default User\.m2) which obviously is causing a problem with the path later on. How sick is that?!?

Then, after having tried this and that, I discovered there is a brand new version 2.3 available so I tested that one and guess what – everything works fine again! Hence, don't use version 2.2, it seems to be broken...

docbkx-maven-plugin

The latest version of that plugin is 2.0.9, but that did not work correctly. It failed the build with this error:

ValidationException: null:30:723: Error(30/723): fo:table-body is missing child elements.
Required Content Model: marker* (table-row+|table-cell+)

The given line/position information did not match to anything suspicious, and I could not see anything wrong in our XSL files. So, no idea what this issue is telling me or what could I do about it. That's why I rolled back to 2.0.8 which just works fine.

The Bottom Line

With the given plugin versions, we are up to date again and managed to get rid of some issues hitting us since quite some time. Additionally, we are well prepared for upgrading to Maven 3. I hope I will be able to do so soon, to check if this is really a "drop-in replacement"... I will let you know!