I did a rebuild of a bunch of packages with maven-debian-helper 2.0~exp2 installed, to see what would break.
The resultant build logs are in https://rbuild.fau.xxx/2015-11-25-mdh-2-2/ , and the failures are sorted in the sorted/ subdirectory. Summary: 38 install-plugin-missing 10 other-missing-plugins 8 antrun-missing (plugin) 6 other-compile-failure 5 other-missing-artifacts 5 compiler-api-missing 4 multimodule-project-dir 3 test-failures 3 scm-publish-plugin 3 maven2-settings-debian 3 builder-failure 2 invalid-plugin-descriptor Missing plugins could be one of two things: 1) I believe maven-debian-helper Requires maven2 Recommends maven-install-plugin, which the builders may previously have been installing, and this round has not been? That is, the packages were possibly broken anyway, and it just happens that this build has caught them. 2) It is believed that maven3 requires some plugins present, even if they're not used during the build, whereas maven 2 would not. Excluding plugins and probably-unrelated-FTBFS, we're left with: maven2-settings-debian, which is probably a bug in these packages, e.g. https://sources.debian.net/src/spatial4j/0.3-1/debian/rules/#L10 dh_auto_configure mh_patchpoms -plibspatial4j-java --debian-build --keep-pom-version --maven-repo=/spatial4j-0.3/debian/maven-repo mvn install:install-file -s/etc/maven2/settings-debian.xml -Dmaven.repo.local=`pwd`/debian/maven-repo -Dfile=/usr/share/java/jts.jar -DgroupId=com.vividsolutions -DartifactId=jts -Dversion=fake -Dpackaging=jar [ERROR] Error executing Maven. [ERROR] The specified user settings file does not exist: /etc/maven2/settings-debian.xml multimodule-project-dir, which I don't get at all but causes later failures: dh_testdir mvn-debian package -Dmaven.multiModuleProjectDirectory system property is not set. Check $M2_HOME environment variable and mvn script match. touch build-stamp debian/rules binary i.e. somewhere between 7 and 20 packages, if some maven plugins are added to maven-debian-helper's Depends.