ibiblio.org was offline today. This meant my build didn't work. Of course, no error was given, which we've come to expect from Maven ;)
All it said was:
$ maven jar:install __ __ | \/ |__ _Apache__ ___ | |\/| / _` \ V / -_) ' \ ~ intelligent projects ~ |_| |_\__,_|\_/\___|_||_| v. 1.0.2 Attempting to download one-of-our-libraries.jar.
Then it just kept waiting and waiting.
So after one of the developer wasted an hour or so finding out what the hell goes wrong, he walked to one of the sysops. This clever sysop got the luminous idea to ping ibiblio.org. Offline... After that, it was a quick fix to temporarily remove ibilio from the remote repository line in the project.properties.
This goes to show how important it is to display understandable errors for the user. Come to think of it, this goes to show how you should try to catch errors and see if there's a way to continue.
And why the flying freak is this thing looking on ibiblio for our proprietary libraries?