I was working on a project and hitting a bug in the maven eclipse plugin which was causing the JRE to be placed incorrectly in the Eclipse .classpath. If it was just a single project I'd have gone and edited the resulting file manually but it affected a few, so I thought I'd try and grab a newer copy of the maven eclipse plugin. I did this by first adding a profile to my maven setttings.xml file ($HOME/.m2/settings.xml on UNIX).
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<settings xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/settings-1.0.0.xsd">
<profiles>
<!-- This is the additional bit you need -->
<profile>
<id>apache-plugin-snapshots</id>
<pluginRepositories>
<pluginRepository>
<id>apache-snapshots</id>
<name>Apache Snapshot Repository</name>
<url>https://repository.apache.org/content/groups/snapshots-group/</url>
<releases>
<enabled>false</enabled>
</releases>
<snapshots>
<enabled>true</enabled>
</snapshots>
</pluginRepository>
</pluginRepositories>
</profile>
</profiles>
</settings>
and then run the mvn eclipse command:
mvn -Papache-plugin-snapshots org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-eclipse-plugin:2.9-SNAPSHOT:eclipse
which downloaded the newer plugin and then ran it against the project I had checked out.
