Scala, Lift, and (yuck!) Maven

I've developed an intense interest in Scala (http://www.scala-lang.org) and Lift (http://liftweb.net/), but the Lift main website only has instructions to set up Lift with Maven (http://maven.apache.org/). As of today Maven is broken on Debian Squeeze/Sid (package dependency on libmaven-scm-java is broken).

Jim McBeath is my hero, he compiled instructions to set up Lift without Maven:
http://jim-mcbeath.blogspot.com/2009/05/lift-without-maven.html


This fellow (which Jim links to) has a list of reasons and a good discussion about disliking Maven.
http://ghostganz.com/blog/articles/2008/10/26/the-things-that-are-wrong-with-maven

My reasons are simple:
1. I am trying to understand Scala and Lift. I don't need to add Maven to the list.
2. I want to understand the architecture of a complete, packaged Lift application .war archive. Maven hides a lot of those details from me and has its own non-trivial learning curve, and that is tremendously annoying.