Also, don’t depend on 3rd parties to define or manage the meta-data. Create your own, and manage your own repository. It’s a little more work up front, but it’s a lot less hassle over the long run.

Of course you can rightly claim that the whole design of the maven dependency management is fatally flawed, but I seem to notice plenty of projects who leverage maven with excellent success while others screw it up royally. And this seems to be far more dependent on the team behind the project rather than the complexity of the technology they are creating.

It seems to me that JBoss doesn’t even bother testing the majority of things it publishes to the maven repositories. The only worse offenders are the Sun projects at java.net who actually seem interested in figuring out ways of to make using maven completely impossible. On the other hand the Spring team has a pretty good track record at publishing reasonable maven metadata even though they don’t even use it as a build tool for their core project.

Despite the flaws in maven, this type of problem reveals the differences in quality control between different project teams. At least Grails avoids maven altogether rather then confusing the issue by supporting it only halfway.