I just spent 2 days constructing Apache Stratos and it was an apalling experience. Both Stratos and one of its key components: jcloud are massively-complex projects and they brought out the worst in Maven 3.
In theory, Maven is a “write-once, build-anywhere” system. Practice wasn’t quite as kind to me this last week. In addition to the grief I had building Stratos, it turns out that Maven 3 does strange things to the dbunit tests on one of my own major projects for no apparent reason or gain.
Stratos, on the other hand, showed the weaknesses in repository retrieval, as many dependencies simply refused to download from the master repo over and over again and had to be manually yanked from the repository and installed by hand in my local repository. In some cases, the jar didn’t seem to be present on the master repo at all, in others, that particular part of the repository simply timed out when attempting to look at it with the search.maven.org browser and I had to find a secondary source. I thought Maven was supposed to have the intelligence to consult mirror servers!
Having finally downloaded and/or built all the components, the last wall I hit was the error in this post’s title:
No plugin found for prefix ‘X’ in the current project and in the plugin groups
I got this because Maven ran out of memory. PermGen space, no less! So I tried adding the usual Java memory parameters to the Maven command line, and that’s when I got this mysterious message.
Turns out, that the memory options are not passed verbatim to Maven’s JVM, they are passed as though they were command-line arguments, so an “-Xmx” option comes out as something like Maven goal “X”. Obviously not what I needed.
To get the MAVEN_OPTS set in Linux for a 1-shot build command, I used the following command line, instead:
MAVEN_OPTS=” -XX:MaxPermSize=256m” mvn -Dmaven.test.skip=true install
This gave Maven the necessary cues to finish the build. I now have an allegedly useful Stratos system to play with.