Read this Infoq Maven debate Another post worth reading is Don Brown's
The key problems with Maven seem to be:
- Poor documentation leading to a somewhat steep learning curve
- Inconsistent builds due to fact that repository metadata is not properly maintained and newer broken versions of plugins can be released. Maintaining transitive dependencies is a hard problem! This issue can be addressed by using very specific versions of plugins in the Maven pom.xml and by caching dependencies in a local metadata repo and configuring your Maven build to look there first before going to general repos like Maven or ibiblio.
- Verbosity of the pom.xml- this is primarily due to XML language choice itself. One way to address this is to use inheritance and put most of common stuff in a parent pom so that a project's pom is limited primarily to dependencies.
- Dealing with large multi-module projects - even Ant builds I suspect will have a problem here.
