Thank you for your bug report, and I agree that it should be severity=important. I'd prefer lenny to go out without Maven rather than with this bug.
This problem (and http://bugs.debian.org/458895) happen because Debian's version of Maven uses version 1.1 of Apache's commons-cli library, whereas upstream's Maven uses version 1.0. Version 1.1 has introduced significantly different behaviour around the handling of repeated arguments (such as: -Dsome.option=0 -Dsomething.else=1). The fix for 458895 allowed multiple "-D" args, as in: mvn -e archetype:create -DgroupId=org.x.y -DartifactId=z -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-j2ee-simple But then commons-cli assumes that everything after the first "-D" is another "-D", which is why this fails: mvn -Dsome.option=0 install Unless I am missing something obvious, commons-cli 1.1 is rather broken and can't support the syntax Maven requires. I'll look more deeply into commons-cli's code this week to see what we should do. Thanks, Paul