[SUREFIRE-573] When temp directory is missing or not writeable, error messages should state that plainly somewhere

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 2.4.3
• Fix Version/s: 2.7
• Component/s: Maven Surefire Plugin
• Environment: Cygwin on Windows XP Pro, maven 2.2.1, apache-tika-0.4, JDK 1.6.0_16
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Jeff Cadow
• Created: 10/Sep/09 12:05
• Updated: 15/Dec/10 01:56
• Resolved: 15/Dec/10 01:56

Description

My TEMP and TMP environment variables were pointing to a directory I forgot to recreate after rebuilding my machine.
When I invoked "mvn install" from the apache-tika-0.4 directory, I got the following BUILD ERROR:
Error creating properties files for forking; nested exception is java.io.IOException: The system cannot find the path specified

The Java stack trace that maven's -e switch dumped indicated that surefire was trying to create a temp file, but didn't say where.

If I had seen "$TEMP/<filename>" or "/home/jcadow/TEMP/<filename>" in an error message or stack trace, it would have saved me 2 days.

Attaching build.log, the output of "mvn -e install".

TO REPRODUCE:
Install maven 2.2.1, download apache-tika-0.4, rename your temp directory, invoke 'mvn -e install' from apache-tika-0.4 base directory.