For some reason, maven doesn't see junit. Its defined in the dependencies of my pom, however. Its giving me a "junit.framework" package doesn't exist, as well as errors which indicate that the assertEquals and other junit staples are undefined ................. any thoughts ?
The junit dependency declaration looks OK to me. In which build phase are you getting the errors? You do not, by any chance, have any unit tests in src/main/java?
The "scope" for junit is "test". This means that junit will be include in the classpath only when compiling code within src/test/java and when running the unit tests. junit will not be in the classpath when compiling code win src/java/main.