If you've got sufficient complexity in your build environment to get into situations like that, the last thing I'd be considering would be to move from a disciplined build environment like Maven to an ad-hoc one. Especially just to make an
IDE happy. One of the reasons I'm so big on UI-free build processes like Ant and Maven is that GUI-based builders come and go, but the text-based stuff is more stable. And stability is critical in a large business environment.
I'd consider turning off the Eclipse auto-build instead. Which I've done on occasion when Eclipse got its wires excessively crossed.
However, since recent versions of Eclipse have been better behaved in that area (just don't ask me my opinions about its XML/HTML editors
), if I were you, I'd map out the Maven inter-dependencies and ensure that they weren't truly circular. Because if they are, you can't reliably build everything from scratch on a cold machine. And that's the kind of stuff that makes me nervous.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.