I’m getting a very annoying error trying to do maven release builds on our CI servers, which isn’t appearing on my local workstation. The build seems to fail because the pom file is under source control (I’m using Perforce) and so it’s read-only. However, It should check out the pom file so that it isn’t read only. Alas, that doesn’t seem top be working. Here are the errors I got initially:

[ERROR] BUILD ERROR
[INFO] ————————————————————————
[INFO] Error writing POM: C:\Program Files\Cruise Agent\pipelines\yadda\yadda\pom.xml (Access is denied)

The reason behind it appeared to be:

[ERROR] CommandLineException Exit code: 1 – Client ‘xpcruisebuildvm1-STANDARD-ALL’ can only be used from host ‘xpcruisebuildvm1’.

Command line was:p4 -d “C:\Program Files\Cruise Agent\pipelines\yadda\yadda” -p perforce.mycompany.com:1666 ed
it pom.xml
org.codehaus.plexus.util.cli.CommandLineException: Exit code: 1 – Client ‘xpcruisebuildvm1-STANDARD-ALL’ can only be used from host ‘xpcruisebuildvm1’

So the first thing I did was create a new clientspec for that machine which had all the files mapped to its c:\temp directory, and then tried to run the build again, assuming this would fix the issue but present me with a whole new problem about how to fit this all in to my CI system. However, this also failed:

[ERROR] BUILD ERROR
[INFO] ————————————————————————
[INFO] Error writing POM: C:\TEMP\yadda\pom.xml (Access is denied)

This is confusing because the clientspec I’m using does have these files in its view and therefore Maven should be able to edit them. Also, this is how I have it setup on my local workstation, and that works fine…

After a lot of trial and error I managed to make some progress. One of the issues was that the client spec had the following mapping in it:

//JavaDevelopment/main/yadda/… //XPCRUISEVM808_release/temp/yadda/…

and the root was set to C:\

This means all P4 files should sync to my C:\TEMP directory, which already existed on the machine. As expected, the sync worked fine and all files appeared in C:\TEMP\yadda.

And therein lies the rub: the client spec uses lowercase “temp”, while the windows directory was uppercase “TEMP”. As simple as that. I changed the client spec to math the filesystem and for good measure updated my release plugin version to 2.1. Problem solved (well, actually that presents me with a whole new problem because I don’t want every build agent to have different client specs, because I’m using Go, and that puts them in it’s own directory under the name of the build job. Grrrr).