It's been a year since we built what seems to have been a remarkably stable Cocoon+eXist, and we've been using it for many projects. However, today, working on the Moses project, I came across what looks to me like a bug in the functioning of util:expand(), which is preventing me from making the search engine work exactly as I had hoped. So I've finally bitten the bullet, and I'm trying to use our Cocoon+eXist build script again. These are the hoops I've had to jump through so far:

• In the rebuild of my machine, a directory called build_files had unaccountably disappeared from my build tree. This contained all our key files. I restored it from Rutabaga.
• JAVA_HOME was not set on my machine. I set it to point to the Sun JRE, only to discover that I need the JDK, so I installed that.
• Next I got a Cocoon error due to a duplicate entry in the jars.xml file; I don't know why this error is suddenly appearing, but perhaps a new file got included into eXist which was previously already in Cocoon.
• However, the showstopper is a stack of errors that show up when building eXist itself, during the build of the Lucene extension. I can't see what's causing these, but tomorrow I'm going to do a full new checkout and try it all again.

Frustrating and annoying, but I guess necessary.