I have this situation: An artifact in maven local repo that I don't want to use anymore. Instead, I want it to be downloaded by maven from proxied nexus remote repository. It's a typical situation cause a lot of artifacts are called just name-SNAPSHOT and the artifact is changing but the name is still the same. Eclipse with m2eclipse is running.

• I delete the entire directory of the artifact in local maven repo
• m2eclipse "Reindex local maven repository" - which creates a new nexus index for local maven repo I guess
• Project -> maven > Update Dependencies - now m2eclipse should run maven, which doesn't see the artifact in local maven repo, so it uses nexus repositories to download it (expected behavior)
• Instead, the directory structure in maven local repo is recreated and there is this file: "m2e-lastUpdated.properties" with following inside:

local|http\://nexus\:8082/nexus-webapp-1.6.0/content/groups/public|javadoc=1274399332215 local|http\://nexus\:8082/nexus-webapp-1.6.0/content/groups/public|sources=1274399332161

and m2eclipse says Missing artifact net.sourceforge.htmlunit:htmlunit:jar:2.8-SNAPSHOT:compile

even though the artifact physically exists here: nexus:8082/nexus-webapp-1.6.0/content/repositories/htmlunit-snapshot/net/sourceforge/htmlunit/htmlunit/2.8-SNAPSHOT/htmlunit-2.8-SNAPSHOT.jar

Maven just doesn't use this location at all. Trust me I tried everything, this m2eclipse behavior is terrible.