Now that I'm back at a keyboard, I'll explain why it's good to make sure that 'mvn package' works for a project.
There are mistakes you can make with a large maven project that can be hidden by the contents of the local repo. You can, for example, typo a change to an artifact id. If the old one is still in the repo, the build will pass. Thus, it seems to be a pretty common practice to do things like rig hudson jobs to use package, rather than install, so that the local repo can be left out of the picture.
