Maybe there is a maven-compiler-plugin option for this, but I haven't found it.
When javac is run directly and prints an error, after the first line of the message, it shows the affected line of source with a caret on the next line pointing to the error position. It looks like this:
com/invariantproperties/udt/sql/RationalUDT.java:324: error: cannot find symbol
public static boolean lessThan(RRationalUDT p, double q) {
^
symbol: class RRationalUDT
location: class RationalUDT
Notice the lines that point directly at where I misspelled the type name. The maven-compiler-plugin shows it like this:
[ERROR] /var/tmp/pljava-udt-type-extension/java/src/main/java/com/invariantproperties/udt/sql/RationalUDT.java:[324,36] cannot find symbol
symbol: class RRationalUDT
location: class com.invariantproperties.udt.sql.RationalUDT
Notice it got rid of the line(s) actually pointing to the error. (This is using Oracle JDK 7.)
Ok, so at first I thought this older question was going to have the answer, because it was also about maven-compiler-plugin not showing the whole error message, and it said the fix was to update to maven-compiler-plugin version 3.1.
But for this issue I have tried 2.4, 3.1, and 3.5 without any improvement. The lines displaying the error are always missing.
This applies to any javac error. In the example I misspelled a symbol just to get the same error that the older question was talking about. But I can fix that one and make another one (this one comes from a javac annotation processor):
com/invariantproperties/udt/sql/RationalUDT.java:324: error: No known mapping to an SQL type
public static boolean lessThan(RationalUDT p, double q) {
^
and here again what the maven-compiler-plugin shows is only:
[ERROR] /var/tmp/pljava-udt-type-extension/java/src/main/java/com/invariantproperties/udt/sql/RationalUDT.java:[324,47] error: No known mapping to an SQL type
I mean, at least it shows the line and column in brackets, so it's not totally impossible to find the error, but the normal display from javac is even more helpful. Is there any way to have the maven-compiler-plugin not hide it?