Maven and Eclipse RCP aka taking a trip to hell

Trying to get Maven and Eclipse RCP to work together to produce a build has been a complete nightmare. A member of my team spent a week trying to accomplish this feat and the end result has been hindering development ever since. Every time the plugin dependencies change, which in a young project is quite often, we're forced to update number of files by hand to accommodate the build process, which is fairly complex so that only one person on the team really knows what the hell is going on. I wouldn't believe how difficult something like building an RCP app with Maven can be, if I didn't live through it. Very frustrating stuff. Especially given that we're all quite happy with the way the actual RCP application has turned out.

Maven ...

It seems one cannot get away from Maven now a days. In my current job as well as in my new job (which I start in a few days) we'll be using Maven to build and manage projects.
While Maven is quite nice in theory the plug-ins for it leave much to be desired in many cases. So without further delay here is a quote of the day by a colleague of mine:

"I hate Maven and the open source community!"

This made me laugh out since we use (pretty much exclusively) open source tools and software (NetBeans, Eclipse, GlassFish etc.) to build and run the business. But nevertheless, after a few days of hell trying to implement release management using a combination of Maven and Hudson plug-ins, universal hatred is what we have :)