Why does Maven use the wrong plugin despite explicit plugin and pluginManagement version?

Question

My parent pom exlicitly declares a dependence on maven-javadoc-plugin 2.9.1 in both

<pluginManagement>
   <plugins>
     <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-javadoc-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>2.9.1</version>
     </plugin>
        ...

and

    <reporting>
      <plugin>
         <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
         <artifactId>maven-javadoc-plugin</artifactId>
         <version>2.9.1</version>
         ...

(see Maven plugin version in pom (seemingly) ignored ) and mvn help:effective-pom shows 2.9.1 is being used. However, the build is using 2.10 which is causes build failures (see maven-javadoc-plugin breaks mvn release:perform and http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MJAVADOC-407 )

mvn help:describe -DgroupId=org.apache.maven.plugins \
                  -DartifactId=maven-javadoc-plugin

shows

    Name: Apache Maven Javadoc Plugin
    Description: The Apache Maven Javadoc Plugin is a plugin that uses the
      javadoc tool for generating javadocs for the specified project.
    Group Id: org.apache.maven.plugins
    Artifact Id: maven-javadoc-plugin
    Version: 2.10
    Goal Prefix: javadoc

Meanwhile,

mvn dependency:resolve-plugins

shows

[INFO] Plugin Resolved: maven-javadoc-plugin-2.9.1.jar

Yet when I run the build, mvn uses 2.10 instead, causing a build failure.

How can I force maven to use 2.9.1 and not the broken 2.10?

(I'm using Maven 3.2.1)

Answer 1

Be sure that you are looking at the right dependency. We are seeing that 2.9.1 as specified is being used for site reports but 2.10 is being used by the build. I believe you should specify it in your

<build><plugins>

section as well.

We just verified that we were suffering the same problem. We had the plugin version in the reporting plugins section but not build plugins. Once we added it to the build plugins section, the issue was resolved. The reason it needed to be in build plugins was because it was being used in the prepare deploy phase to build a javadoc jar. This happens separately from generating javadoc for the site reports.