I have been attempting to create a patch fix against Hibernate Core to attach to a JIRA issue.

So, I tried to check out & build the trunk of Hibernate Core, guided by the documentation at:

http://www.hibernate.org/6.html#A4

1. That documentation appears to be out of date and incorrect. The SVN URL given for the core is not there - it has moved.

2. After some looking, I found where it had moved to and checked it out. But I then found the docs for compiling Hibernate were also no longer correct, as the Ant buildfile they mentioned is missing:

http://www.hibernate.org/6.html#A5

3. The Hibernate Core now seems to require Maven to build. Im a Maven beginner, but installed it and tried to build the Core, but received errors (unfortunately I dont have them at hand now) that a needed "parent" was not found in the central Maven repository.

Can anyone point me to up-to-date instructions to how to build Hibernate Core?

I tried the same and couldn't build it either. The latest release (3.2.5ga) comes with source and a build.bat/build.sh file which works without any messing around. Perhaps you could use this to create your patch - probably not very different from trunk.