Wondering if someone can link me to some explicit documentation around the update policy for plugin repositories.
I ran into an issue today with our CI server where one build would use a particularly old version of the sonar-maven-plugin. I eventually realized after some digging that it was due to the contents of the maven-metadata.xml file for the artifact. When I ran help:effective-pom on the project, I saw that the regular repository element for Maven Central does not specify an update policy, but the pluginRepository element for Central *does* specify it as *never*! I couldn't spot any official docs on this, and it doesn't appear that it's set in the default %MAVEN_HOME%/conf/settings.xml. I also confirmed it wasn't set that way in my ~/.m2/settings.xml, so it appears to be hard-coded at some level in Maven itself. My question then is twofold. First, what's the rationale for having plugin metadata go stale? Regular dependencies from Central don't act this way, and it was very surprising. Second, what's the recommended approach here? It's rare that I'm running a plugin that isn't specified directly in the POM, so that "feels" like the right approach -- just specify a plugin element in the project (or parent POM) for Sonar and it should work. That also will work for all consumers of the project, versus recommending changes to each user's settings.xml to override the update policy for Central. Can anyone comment on that strategy? -- Thanks, Tom Golden
