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Maven omg

It was a very simple task. The library Twitter4j (4.0.1) was compiled for Java 6 and I need a 1.5 compatible version. So, I thought it shouldn't be a problem to compile the project with 1.5 compatibility :)
Twitter4j is available via git and after cloning and switching to 4.0.1 everything was available. I tried to import the maven project with Eclipse (Kepler) and got many problems because of missing libraries. WTF?

Shouldn't maven solve all dependency problems? I didn't try to fix problems with Eclipse because it could be a maven plugin problem. So I tried maven itself with jdk 1.5 and some minutes later I got other exceptions because Twitter4j source was written with Java 6 syntax (@Override with interface methods).
So I had to use Java 6 with 1.5 target option... After modifying pom.xml of twitter4j-core, the build had another problem: All test cases failed :) . So I had to use the command-line property -Dmaven.test.skip=true to ignore unit tests.

Finally I got my 1.5 compatible Twitter4j library.

But it was an awful task because maven bundled with Eclipse didn't work as expected. It's horrible if tools that should save time, waste time. I still don't like maven. IMHO it's still to complex compared to other build tools.
A build tool shouldn't be as complex as developing software.

Nowadays everything has to work with our IDEs, but what happens if it doesn't?

I'm a researcher and love solving problems but is it that complex to keep things simple?
Software has to be simple to help us and we - developers - have to write simple software/frameworks/libraries.

Instead of creating simple software, many developers try to write millions LoC. Don't do that because no one can handle such code-bases in the future.

Just sayin'

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