By "chronic disease", I was referring to Maven. And it's not specific to Cocoon, but to many other projects. Maven has brought one new brillant idea to the Java world, which is artifact repositories (note though that Linux repositories have existed for a very long time). But using Maven requires to adhere to the whole thing: repository management, which is good, but also a declarative under-documented build system. And Maven is also self-updating, which is a nice idea on paper but means the buid is not repeatable since you don't know what is used to build your system.