or an insidious error which resulted in jenkins builds where the sources jar did not match the binary jar

I still can’t work out exactly how this works. I recently made some changes to one of our Maven archetypes, and released the new version using Jenkins. I was confused to discover that projects created with the new version of the archetype did not contain the changes. I checked the git repository tag. I checked the source jar in Artifactory. Both contained the changes. I checked the binary jar and it did not (the changes were to resource files).

I checked out locally, ran maven clean and then maven package. The resulting binary jar was fine.

I wiped out the Jenkins workspace and repeated the build. The binary jar was created incorrectly! Cue lots of head scratching, until a quick thinking colleague asked if I’d checked in the target directory at any point. And I HAD! So although I’d wiped the jenkins workspace, the fresh checkout had got back the out of date target contents. AND the jenkins job did not begin with a maven clean.

A lesson in better house-keeping.