Maven compilation fails with issues in gmaven-plugin

I ran into a weird exception when compiling my maven project. This failed even when the project had no code or dependencies. Searching our dear google gave ridiculous results. But finally I found the solution.

Error:

[INFO] BUILD FAILURE

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

[INFO] Total time: 8.521s

[INFO] Finished at: Thu May 21 16:59:13 PDT 2015

[INFO] Final Memory: 12M/491M

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.codehaus.gmaven:gmaven-plugin:1.3:execute (calculate-srcroot) on project bigsky-ui-tests: groovy.lang.GroovyRuntimeException: Ambiguous method overloading for method java.io.File#<init>.

[ERROR] Cannot resolve which method to invoke for [null, class java.lang.String] due to overlapping prototypes between:

[ERROR] [class java.lang.String, class java.lang.String]

[ERROR] [class java.io.File, class java.lang.String]

[ERROR] -> [Help 1]

The error is pretty misleading. The solution to this is to check the parent reference in pom.xml

I had missed the pom reference in the below -

<parent>

<groupId>com.vmware</groupId>

<artifactId>bigsky</artifactId>

<version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>

<relativePath>../src/pom.xml</relativePath>                      <!-- Had not provided this -->

</parent>