I have discovered a bug in mvn 2.2.1 in relation to inheritance of profiles.
It affects profile inheritance within MavenProject and the maven-help-plugin. 1. The help mojo issue: This appears to be a bug that has been re-introduced into mvn 2.2.1: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MPH-16 There is a test file attached to the jira, helptest.zip. The original recursive tree walk appears to have been removed for some reason, or made to depend on mavenProject.getActiveProfiles(). Testing was performed using command line: mvn help:active-profiles 2. This relates to profile information containing repository and build plugins in a parent pom (anywhere in the hierarchy tree). A mvn deploy failed as no distribution repository details were loaded. Reference docs on profiles: http://maven.apache.org/settings.html#Profilesand http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVEN/Build+Profiles Would anyone know of a fix or workaround for (2) please? Moving the profile and its build plugins to settings.xml or profiles.xml does not help as the schema does not support the <build> element beneath <profile>. The profile's <build> plugins are a system wide feature for me. Effectively, in my production profile a series of plugins run to integrate details to a wider system, which are not to be executed in my staging and development profiles.