ClassNotFound error when building Fest with maven

Question

Would like to try out fest 2.x branch. I'm not familiar with maven, but I downloaded fest from github, which gave me a pom.xml, so I ran maven with mvn install, and get the following:

[INFO] Error stacktraces are turned on.
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO]                                                                         
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building FEST Fluent Assertions (Core) 2.0M9-SNAPSHOT
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] 
[INFO] --- maven-enforcer-plugin:1.0:enforce (enforce-maven) @ fest-assert-core ---
[INFO] 
[INFO] --- maven-resources-plugin:2.5:resources (default-resources) @ fest-assert-core ---
[debug] execute contextualize
[INFO] Using 'UTF-8' encoding to copy filtered resources.
[INFO] skip non existing resourceDirectory /Users/sbarnum/Java/fest-assert-2.x-master/src/main/resources
[INFO] 
[INFO] --- maven-compiler-plugin:2.5.1:compile (default-compile) @ fest-assert-core ---
[INFO] Compiling 180 source files to /Users/sbarnum/Java/fest-assert-2.x-master/target/classes
[INFO] -------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] COMPILATION ERROR : 
[INFO] -------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] /Users/sbarnum/Java/fest-assert-2.x-master/src/main/java/org/fest/assertions/internal/Numbers.java:[31,17] cannot find symbol
symbol  : class Comparison
location: class org.fest.assertions.internal.Numbers<NUMBER>
[ERROR] /Users/sbarnum/Java/fest-assert-2.x-master/src/main/java/org/fest/assertions/error/ShouldContain.java:[38,6] cannot find symbol
symbol  : class Comparison
location: class org.fest.assertions.error.ShouldContain
[ERROR] /Users/sbarnum/Java/fest-assert-2.x-master/src/main/java/org/fest/assertions/error/ShouldContain.java:[53,73] cannot find symbol
symbol  : class Comparison
location: class org.fest.assertions.error.ShouldContain

What am I missing? Is it ungrateful of me to ask for just a downloadable .jar?

Answer 1

I think, based on the output from their CI server, that their build is currently broken, and has been broken since Dec 15th. So nothing you did, they just have broken code in their repo.

You can pull the last successfully built jar out of their CI server here, under "Last Successful Artifacts"

Answer 2

Fest current build is very unstable as Alex (Fest creator) is doing a major refactoring. He has pushed his unfinished work to be able to continue working on it hence the broken build. I don't know when this refactoring will be finished.

Having said that, the common way to use Fest is to get the latest release from maven central repo (either using maven, gradle, ivy ....).

You can even download the jar directly from maven central repo there, nevertheless I would recommend using a build tools that can download transitive dependencies.

Cheers,

Joel Costigliola (fest commiter)

Answer 3

Is it ungrateful of me to ask for just a downloadable .jar?

No, it isn't ungrateful to ask for a precompiled binary; but, if you are downloading source code and compiling, then you are picking the wrong item.

Perhaps they didn't release a precompiled binary, in which case I feel for you. Basically this build is obviously broken for reasons that closely resemble "They started changing stuff but didn't finish the job", and you may either attempt to pull from an earlier snapshot of the repository, or fix the "whatever" that they didn't get around to.

Assuming that you don't care about the code, can you find the binaries you seek amongst http://code.google.com/p/fest/downloads/list?