Building in Maven without cleaning

When we build a Maven project without doing mvn clean, we sometimes get "voodoo errors" such as NoSuchMethodError. I believe these are caused by moving/renaming f开发者_如何学Goiles.

I don't want to use the clean option in the CI, because it makes the build process take much longer. Is there another alternative?

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You should always use clean in a CI build. CI builds must be reproducible and that requires starting from scratch!

And about the process taking longer: the whole point of using CI (one of the many) is that you can keep working while it's running, so that should not be a problem.

But what I like to do is use multiple layers of CI per project:

• A first job compiles and executes some basic tests*, this build should take less than 5 minutes
• if that succeeds, a second job executes all tests*, code metrics, javadocs etc
• if that succeeds a third job deploys the build to a test server

(Or you can let the first job trigger both the second and the third job at once)

* You can implement the some tests / all tests functionality by configuring the maven surefire plugin differently per profile)

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We have three build targets:

• Continuous Integration: Builds without doing a Clean, and only run the tests identified by Clover. This runs after each commit. On success it deploys to the test server.

• Nightly: Does a clean build and runs every single test. This runs every night. On success it deploys to the test server.

• Release: Same as Nightly plus creates a source control label. Run manually.

The nightly build is more trustworthy in that a clean build is conducted. However, the CI build is quicker meaning feedback is faster on those occasions.

There is an underlying problem here with the build time, but this is at least a work around while you look at more permanent ways to address that.