These folders host the maven metadata which are used to build release binaries for hosting in the central maven repositories. These are not considered the "canonical" build, but are maintained seperately by (a) volunteer(s) with an interest in easy use of Guava by the Maven build system. As a convenience, these folders have been set up to provide alternate packaging of the sub-pmodules, which correspond to their respective java packages, with sources symbolically linked back to the main project. This will work to allow command-line builds on MacOS X or other Unix platforms which support symbolic linking, but is not known to work on Windows platforms. (Obviously the deployed binaries in maven repostories will work fine on any compliant JVM). The maintainers of these metadata have used M2Eclipse to import these projects directly into Eclipse. Please remember that this codebase uses @Override annotations on methods which implement an interface method, and therefore require a JDK 1.6 (or newer 1.5 with the appropriate fix) to support this behaviour. Executing Maven with an appropriate JAVA_HOME env is sufficient, and these metadata do not have toolchain restrictions currently set up. Christian cgruber@google.com