Major Description
The VerifyMojo has several places where "distribution" is being used. Its primary function is to provide properties needed to launch feature resolution.
Given that we usually can revert to plugin version when we do "verify" call it should succeed as long as maven configuration is proper. This is not a case for 4.2.7 and upper releases too as constructed "distribution" url is simply invalid. Instead of downloading apache-karaf-4.2.7.zip id requests an artifact with extra null classifier:
[DEBUG] http-outgoing-0: set socket timeout to 5000 [DEBUG] Executing request GET /maven2/org/apache/karaf/apache-karaf/4.2.7/apache-karaf-4.2.7-null.zip HTTP/1.1 [DEBUG] Target auth state: UNCHALLENGED [DEBUG] Proxy auth state: UNCHALLENGED [DEBUG] http-outgoing-0 >> GET /maven2/org/apache/karaf/apache-karaf/4.2.7/apache-karaf-4.2.7-null.zip HTTP/1.1 [DEBUG] http-outgoing-0 >> Cache-control: no-cache [DEBUG] http-outgoing-0 >> Cache-store: no-store [DEBUG] http-outgoing-0 >> Pragma: no-cache [DEBUG] http-outgoing-0 >> User-Agent: Aether [DEBUG] http-outgoing-0 >> Host: repo.maven.apache.org [DEBUG] http-outgoing-0 >> Connection: Keep-Alive [DEBUG] http-outgoing-0 >> Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate [DEBUG] http-outgoing-0 >> "GET /maven2/org/apache/karaf/apache-karaf/4.2.7/apache-karaf-4.2.7-null.zip HTTP/1.1[\r][\n]" [DEBUG] http-outgoing-0 >> "Cache-control: no-cache[\r][\n]" [DEBUG] http-outgoing-0 >> "Cache-store: no-store[\r][\n]" [DEBUG] http-outgoing-0 >> "Pragma: no-cache[\r][\n]" [DEBUG] http-outgoing-0 >> "User-Agent: Aether[\r][\n]" [DEBUG] http-outgoing-0 >> "Host: repo.maven.apache.org[\r][\n]" [DEBUG] http-outgoing-0 >> "Connection: Keep-Alive[\r][\n]" [DEBUG] http-outgoing-0 >> "Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate[\r][\n]" [DEBUG] http-outgoing-0 >> "[\r][\n]" [DEBUG] http-outgoing-0 << "HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found[\r][\n]"
Obviously this artifact id is invalid.
In practice all projects I have seen have distribution parameter set as well as provided dependency with specific karaf framework or distro to avoid failures of this small glitch.
I believe this is improper behavior, not sure when it was introduced, and could be fixed to avoid propagation of karaf dependency into basic projects which attempt to build & verify feature file.