The HTTP Wagons should use Reason-Phrase sent in HTTP Response and use that in exception message (at least incorporate it)

The HTTP Wagons should use Reason-Phrase sent in HTTP Response and use that in exception message (at least incorporate it).

This would enable MRMs to at least "hint" somewhat Maven users why it's responding with some error.

Typical example: Maven users using Nexus (but I believe is true for other MRMs too), tend to "forget" about having pull and push URLs different (you usually pull from "groups", and push/deploy to actual reposes). With wrong URL, your build will fail, and Maven message on CLI will state "server responded with code 400" (in case of Nexus, it will respond with Bad Request, since groups are read-only).

Usually, the end user (and Maven) have no clue why the request was rejected, and user has to start investigating about the problem. On the contrary, the server side MRM actually knows very well what the problem is: deploy tried to read-only target, redeployment tried but redeploying is forbidden, deploy of a snapshot tried to a release repository, etc. All of these results with same error code (in case of Nexus): with HTTP 400, but without any explanation shown on client side.

If Wagon – I am not sure about the details – would somehow incorporate the actual Reason-Phrase got from server/MRM, and make Maven display it as part of the message about failed build, it would be much-much easier to realize why the build failed, it will be told by the MRM who actually rejected the request.

By HTTP/1.1 RFC, the Reason-Phrase is unbound, it might have any content (except CR LF), exactly for these cases.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-6