As I’m getting involved in the Maven2 core development, I’ll be writing down my experiencies, so they can be useful for other people.

Features of Maven2:

• Transitive dependency resolution, say projectA depends on projectB and projectB depends on projectC, then you just need to declare projectB dependency in projectA and projectC will be automatically discovered
• No more Jelly, you can use POJOs, they’re called MOJOs ;), it’s a funny name in spanish, also used in Austin Powers movie
• Promotes a standarised directory layout
• Allows a better repository layout, more scalable, and based on internet domain names

Resources of interest are:

• docs at codehaus, although they are a bit outdated
• Sources and core plugins are in Apache CVS
• Non core plugins are in Codehaus CVS

To build it you need to run the bootstrapping process, typing java -jar mboot.jar in the maven-components dir, after creating a ~/.m2/override.xml file that must contain the following entries:

<local>
  <repository>/path/to/m2/repository</repository> (required)
  <online>true</online> (optional)
</local>

Alternatively, you can specify -Dmaven.repo.local=/path/to/m2/repository. Maven2 will be installed in ~/m2.