Getting more and more addicted to maven, there is just one thing that keeps on hurting and that is the UberCryptic errormessages you get from the beast.

$ maven xdoc:transform
 __  __
|  \/  |__ _Apache__ ___
| |\/| / _` \ V / -_) ' \  ~ intelligent projects ~
|_|  |_\__,_|\_/\___|_||_|  v. 1.0

build:start:

xdoc:init:

xdoc:transform:
xdoc:init:

xdoc:copy-resources:
    [copy] Copying 4 files to C:\ot\out\projects\eclipse\Schaubroeck_OTAdvies\atlas\target\docs\style
    [copy] Copying 94 files to C:\ot\out\projects\eclipse\Schaubroeck_OTAdvies\atlas\target\docs\image

BUILD FAILED
File...... C:\app\cygwin\home\mpo\.maven\cache\maven-xdoc-plugin-1.8\plugin.jelly
Element... attainGoal
Line...... 687
Column.... 48
No goal [:register]
Total time: 11 seconds
Finished at: Mon Aug 16 10:27:21 CEST 2004

Q: How to translate the above in plain human language?

A: (lightning and mist, dark lights, bats flying around and a deep voiced evel grin saying:) You are eternally doomed! Woahahah!!!

In my case "No goal [:register]" *obviously* meant stupid me forgetting to remove this default section from some sample project.xml I snatched:

    <reports>
        <report />
    </reports>

I found this quite fast by just diffing the project.xml to one that is working...

At home I'm struggling with setting up a new linux box on some new hardware that probably got me excited a tad too much: default backport of the 2.6 kernel image for debian-woody will just randomly reboot my box (the sarge distro does the same). Over some randomly googled and vaguely similar forum posts I got the hint to compile the kernel myself with disabled PNPBIOS. More cryptographic talents got me to actually build it by tweaking .config to exclude some drivers that seemed to use too much stack. And now the only next thing I need to figure out is how to actually get my new network device up and running (module seems to be tg3, that and 8139too I've selected to be included in the kernel, don't ask why). After that I hope to be checking if the other one and the USB still works correctly. After that I could really get into doing the stuff I needed to do :-(

Where does this put us? I'm quite sure our beloved Cocoon will often make the same mistakes, remaining 'oysterly' sealed to anyone but those that almost devote their life to finding the pearl inside... Does this remain the last big challenge for open source in general, or is this where the commercial service offering around it naturally fits in?

Anyway, in terms of self-help I'd better check out how I can get some more serious logging out of maven for cases like this. This evening I'll get into the quest for some pointer to installing, testing, checking drivers for the linux 2.6 kernel for debian woody... whish me luck translating hints, ideas and random clues... How did people do this before Google?