I gave up on Maven a couple of years ago for the reasons already given. No matter what size partition I used it would be too small within a year or so. I used to grab the dependencies I needed and switched off the Maven Index download in NB.
Recently (couple of years) I started using the Maven repository again but through Gradle. Gradle does not load and decompress the whole index. Gradle loads solely the dependencies (artifact : group : version) specified in the build.gradle file. When building, Gradle loads the dependency files into a folder under ~/.gradle if it's not already there. I liked it so much that I'm now migrating my Ant builds to Gradle as and when. I might do the Maven projects too. I was wondering if that part of Gradle's functionality could be recruited to selectively download relevant dependencies. It looks like the Maven pom contains the same information as Gradle's dependencies configuration. Please forgive me if this seems daft to you. Regards
