eclipse - Maven downloads have .lastUpdated as extension

Question

I have an Eclipse setup with m2eclipse and subversive. I have imported a maven2 project from svn. But I get the error message that a whole bunch of artifacts are missing (for instance: Missing artifact org.springframework:spring-test:jar:3.0.1.RELEASE:test).

If I look in my repository I see the jar files there but they have an extra extension .lastUpdated. Why is maven appending .lastUpdated to the jars? And more importantly: how can I fix this?

There is no mention of the type lastUpdated in my POMs.

Answer 1

These files indicate to Maven that it attempted to obtain the archive by download, but was unsuccessful. In order to save bandwidth it will not attempt this again until a certain time period encoded in the file has elapsed. The command line switch -U force maven to perform the update before the retry period. This may be necessary if you attempted to build while disconnected from the network.

The method of removing the files works with most versions of maven, but since the files are internal mementos to maven, I would not recommend this method. There is no guarantee that this information is not referenced or held elsewhere and such manipulation can damage the system.