Bei Brandeins habe ich einen interessanten Artikel zum Thema Veränderung und wie wir damit umgehen gelesen. Er ist unter dem Titel „Maßstabsgerecht“ erschienen und gibt einige interessante Denkanstöße, insbesondere zu der Frage, ob man nicht oft aus Bequemlichkeit in gewohnten Denkmustern verharrt.
This afternoon, I spent several hours to figure out a problem that in the end turned out to be a bug in the Apache Maven Javadoc Plugin (version 2.10.3).
I wanted to use a custom stylesheet when building the Javadocs of all modules of a multi-module Maven project, so I generated a JAR that contained the stylesheet file, added it to the dependencies of the plugin and referenced it in the <stylesheetfile> tag.
To my suprise, Maven kept complaining with a message like
[WARNING] Unable to find the resource 'path/to/my/stylesheet.css'. Using default Javadoc resources.
I checked everything, tried various ways to configure the dependency, etc., but I could not get it to work. So I resorted to the last thing one can do when a software does not work as expected. I grabbed the source code of the plugin, found the relevant part that generated the message, and attached to the Maven process with a debugger. As it turned out, the problem was actually caused by a bug in the plugin that lead to resources from dependencies not being resolved correctly.
I filed a bug report and attached a patch to the bug report that fixes the problem for me. I hope that this patch will soon make it into a release version of the plugin. Until then, maybe this article helps someone else by saving the time to look for the cause of the issue.