My opinion of Maven is the same as Winston Churchill's opinion of democracy: "It's the worst system, aside from all the other systems." I've seen plenty of ma

My opinion of Maven is the same as Winston Churchill's opinion of democracy: "It's the worst system, aside from all the other systems." I've seen plenty of makefiles bomb out on systems that were different from the system they were written for -- it's hard to have that problem with Maven. And the idea of a versioned repo that stores multiple revisions of all of your components is awesome, provided you actually use it correctly and don't leave everything at 0.1-SNAPSHOT forever. The problem it's solving is inherently hellish, so while there could be better ways of solving it, Maven's the least crappy one I've seen so far.