dependency resolution - Maven fails to find local artifact

Question

Occasionally maven complains that a particular dependency, which is built and packaged locally, cannot be found in the local repository while building another project that has it as a dependency. We get an error like:

Failed to execute goal on project X: Could not resolve dependencies for project X: Failure to find Y in [archiva repository] was cached in the local repository, resolution will not be reattempted until the update interval of internal has elapsed or updates are forced ->

Where X is the project being built, and Y is the supposedly missing artifact. If you look in the local repository, the artifact is there. This artifact is never installed in our archiva repository, so the problem is purely based in the local repository.

We have tried various profiles in settings.xml, and of course "mvn -U". Neither do any good, nor should they because this artifact never goes any further than the local repository.

The only two things that seem to work are to wait a very long time until maven smartens up, or to completely delete the local repository. Presumably the waiting option is related to the aforementioned update interval.

We have experienced this problem with maven 3.0.2 and 3.0.3. We are using Archiva 1.0.3 (but again this shouldn't be a factor). Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The local Maven repo tracks where artifacts originally came from using a file named "_maven.repositories" in the artifact directory. After removing it, the build worked. This answer fixed the problem for me.