I agree, it's not an easy job. I'm having the same problems right now.
I hope the maven repository manager will solve some of those difficulties.
See: http://maven.apache.org/repository-manager
There not that much information available, as it's still under development.
Another 'option' is to use
I built our shared repo based on my local repo. You just need to rename
the maven-metadata-central.xml files to maven-metadata.xml I think. The
command 'wget -nd -r -l 1 ' is also very handy to scrape a
directory from central.
We will probably use maven-proxy next time.
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