maven and ports that try to fetch files during build stage

[Pedro Giffuni]

Hello;

Some java ports, especially from ASF projects, commonly use maven
to build and maven is meant to be a ports-like system to fetch
dependencies as part of the build. Maven has it's own repository:
http://search.maven.org/#browse

This is a problem with the Apache POI port but it is also an issue
with a potential Apache hadoop update: apparently our cluster
doesn't like ports that download stuff as part of their build so
Apache POI is broken.

While it should be possible to independently pre-download all the
dependencies and extract them were Maven needs them, this tends
to make the use of Maven for ports a lot of work.

Anyone has a good idea on how this should be dealt with?

Regards,

Pedro.