I was having trouble with maven today and trying to figure out what was going on because none of the error messages I was getting made any sense. After troubleshooting I finally figured out I somehow didn’t have a build.properties file. This was causing everything to behave differently than what I expected. I’m still not sure how this file ever got deleted in the first place. Luckily I was able to recreate it quickly.
So the moral of the story is to make sure you have a build.properties file in your home directory if you start having trouble with maven.