When I first joined our project, our build scripts were written in the Korn shell. Our Korn shell programmer quit after I joined the team. Thus began our build script Hell. The scripts worked fine when everything was as expected. However they would bomb at the slightest disturbance. We needed a full time guy to baby sit this fragile set of Korn shell scripts.Eventually a bunch of Java programmers joined the team. They decided the Korn shell scripts had to go. Being Java guys, they turned to Ant to do the builds. The result was a bit more reliable.
The Java guys got bored after a while. They started looking for ways to improve the build scripts. Maven was cited as a cool build tool. There was talk about redoing the build scripts again. However the Java guys left the project before any progress was made on that front.
It might be a blessing that we never ported our builds to Maven. I just read a rant describing Maven as pure evil. The author recommends you code your own build tool from scratch. He advises you to use Rake or Ant if you want to utilize a package. However he abhors Maven.
Here are the reasons to avoid Maven. It has the worst configuration syntax. The documentation is bad or incomplete. Maven is not flexible. It also has a broken dependency management subsystem. Exercise extreme caution if somebody tries to port your build scripts to Maven.
