This issue was originally reported by Milos Kleint in 20/Jul/06 at codehaus.org - see more details at
http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MEVENIDE-435

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Description:
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the debug switches are passed to the surefire plugin via the -DargLine=-Xdebug...... property.
However when user defines the argLine parameter for surefire plugin in the pom, the system property is not being evaluated.
There's currently no solution to the problem. One idea that needs some prottyping is to add a method to the embedder
that would be able to run the build on top of MavenProject instance instead of a pom file. That we we could dynamically
inject the additional debug switches dynamicaly when constructing the MavenProject instance.

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Comment by Milos Kleint [ 15/Oct/06 12:06 PM ]
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postpone, needs changes in maven embedder binaries.

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Comment by Milos Kleint [ 22/Dec/06 01:35 AM ]
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when talking to jason, I understood that expressions defined in the parameters shall have priority over what's in the
pom. The solution then would be to read the value in pom, enhance it and use as -D<key>=<value> on the command line

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Comment by Milos Kleint [ 24/Oct/07 03:24 AM ]
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A workaround for the issue:
Assuming your surefire setup is like this and your tests need the foobar property set in order to pass.
<project>
....
 <build>
     <plugins>
         <plugin>
             <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
             <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
             <version>2.3</version>
             <configuration>
               <argLine>-Dfoobar=YES</argLine>
             </configuration>
         </plugin>
     </plugins>
 </build>
</project>
1. Add a profile to the pom.xml with the following <profiles> section
<profiles>
     <profile>
         <id>debug</id>
         <activation>
             <property>
                 <name>debug</name>
                 <value>true</value>
             </property>
         </activation>
         <build>
             <plugins>
                 <plugin>
                     <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                     <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
                     <version>2.3</version>
                     <configuration>
                         <argLine>-Dfoobar=YES ${argLine}</argLine>
                     </configuration>
                 </plugin>
             </plugins>
         </build>
     </profile>
 </profiles>
2. Then go to the project's Properties dialog and in the Actions panel, find the "Debug Test" action mapping and add
"debug=true" to the list of properties already present.
Then invoking the "Debug file" action on the test class should run the test and stop at breakpoints correctly. It will
not in 6.0 betas when using the command-line maven instance for building (issue
http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=119866)
The only downside to the workaround is that you have the foobar property setup at 2 distinct places.
If you don't want to include the profile in the pom.xml file, placing it into ${basedir}/profiles.xml shall work in the
same manner. profiles.xml is not shareable by default, so might be a better location.

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Comment by Milos Kleint [ 17/Jan/08 01:39 AM ]
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in surefire plugin 2.4 there's a new property ${maven.surefire.debug} which is used to pass debugging params into the
forked jvm. These are added to the arg parameter.

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Comment by Jeff Campbell [ 23/May/08 05:12 PM ]
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We are seeing the same problem. We are using 2.4.3 surefire plugin and it does not seem to help.

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Comment by Arne And [ 05/Sep/08 03:49 AM ]
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Suggested solution, having an 'externalArgLine' readOnly property which also defaults to ${argLine}, and an
'inheritArgLine' boolean defaulting to true. If user sets 'argLine', it will be appended to 'externalArgLine' if
'inheritArgLine' is true. The inherit can of course be turned off if desirable. See attached suggested implementation.
Not sure if it is the ultimate solution, but at least it worked for me, and gives the user of the plugin the possibility
to decide what argLine to use

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Comment by Jeff Campbell [ 08/Sep/08 03:54 PM ]
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This Bug makes it IMPOSSIBLE to debug a project that uses JMockit tests for its tests because the following needs to be
in the pom.xml file:
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<argLine>-javaagent:"${settings.localRepository}/jmockit/jmockit/0.94/jmockit-0.94.jar"</argLine>
<useSystemClassLoader>true</useSystemClassLoader>
<forkMode>always</forkMode>
</configuration>
</plugin>

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Comment by Milos Kleint [ 10/Sep/08 01:39 AM ]
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Jeff, the maven.sufefire.debug property expression shall be working for you. Just replace the argLine in the action
mapping dialog (in Project's properties) with maven.sufefire.debug=<the old value of argLine>
See
http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-surefire-plugin/examples/debugging.html
however your problem could be with the -javaagent switch, not sure never used it. If you can provide a sample project I
can try debugging it.
IN any case for post netbeans 6.5 maven support, I'm planning to use maven.surefire.debug by default.

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Comment by Jeff Campbell [ 11/Sep/08 01:44 PM ]
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Attached is a VERY simple Maven jar project that shows our issues for debugging in NetBeans, with a Maven project that
requires the <argLine> to be specified. The sample project uses jmockit to run a simple mock test. In this case jmockit
requires a <argLine> parameter to run successfully.
Side note (I don't know if this has any impact on a fix)... We do NOT check-in any Netbeans specific files into our
source control. Because 50% of us are using NetBeans, 48% of us are using Eclipse, and 2% are using IntelliJ, we do NOT
want to check-in any files that are IDE specific (can get really messy to have a bunch of mixed IDE specific files).
So..... hopefully the fix will allow a raw Maven project to debug the attached Maven project.

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Comment by Jeff Campbell [ 11/Sep/08 01:46 PM ]
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One additional side comment.... half of us that use NetBeans are using 6.5 Nightly with the MevenIDE 4.0.4 plugin and we
are STILL seeing the same issue.

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Comment by Milos Kleint [ 12/Sep/08 02:02 AM ]
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Sure, it's not working in 6.5, as I mentioned earlier. I'll be switching to maven.surefire.debug property AFTER 6.5.
So you either use the suggested workaround and will have to live without debugging tests, sorry. Checking the
nbactions.xml file (with custom action mappings in netbeans) has no effect whatsoever on eclipse or idea users.

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Comment by Milos Kleint [ 03/Oct/08 02:30 AM ]
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done for netbeans.next - http://hg.netbeans.org/maven-dev/rev/2f6ef9d18287