I just wanted to get thoughts on a possible new feature. Right now, my company has thousands of Maven modules that are all on snapshots with an updatePolicy of "always" (basically everyone gets the latest build of everything, kind of like a poor man's monorepo). This mostly works fine, but one of the big issues we've run into is that this is pretty slow for local development. For each snapshot, it needs to download the maven-metadata.xml and its checksum to know whether something has changed. And when developing locally, the latency to our Nexus server isn't great (even worse for our developers in the EU) so this process is pretty slow.
To mitigate this, each of our developers run a local proxy that sits in front of Nexus. The proxy talks to our build system to know what artifacts have built so that it can short-circuit the metadata requests if it knows nothing has changed. This works pretty well, but we've never been able to get it to work perfectly. The idea I had that would simplify this setup significantly is if aether/maven-resolver allowed a custom updatePolicy that can be implemented by extensions. This would allow us to simply write an extension with our custom logic and ditch the local proxy and all the edge cases and complexity that it brings. Let me know if this sounds reasonable or if you have any other thoughts. Thanks, Jonathan
