The Maven settings.xml file is a file on your developer machine (usually located at $HOME/.m2/settings.xml) that holds configuration settings that override the Maven pom.xml settings. Here are some settings found to be useful:

Localizing Jetty Deployment for Cargo

By default, acceptanceTests/pom.xml(cargo) is set to download the Jetty 7.x zip file from the Eclipse website. This works, but can be very slow or even fail, if the internet connection to that website is bad. To speed things up, you can download the file, place it some where on your computer, and then tell maven where that file is.

Here's the file: http://download.eclipse.org/jetty/stable-7/dist/jetty-distribution-7.3.0.v20110203.zip
Put this somewhere on your machine that won't be disturbed, for instance $HOME/arc. You may need to make the arc/ directory if you are going to use that.
Construct the file URL for this file. For instance, if you put it in /Users/adam/arc/jetty-distribution-7.3.0.v20110203.zip, the file url would be file:///Users/adam/arc/jetty-distribution-7.3.0.v20110203.zip
.
For Windows, if you put the file in c:\downloadsjetty-distribution-7.3.0.v20110203.zip, the file url would be file:///c:/downloads/jetty-distribution-7.3.0.v20110203.zip.

Save the following text as the $HOME/.m2/settings.xml file, replacing the REPLACE-WITH-FILE-URL in the text below with the URL you just constructed:

<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>
      <profile>
         <id>local</id>
         <activation>
            <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
         </activation>
         <properties>
            <jetty.container.url>REPLACE-WITH-FILE-URL</jetty.container.url>
         </properties>
      </profile>
   </profiles>
</settings>

Proxy Settings

Maven often acts funny if the network is not set up correctly, especially the first time you build. If you access the internet via a proxy server, you must tell maven about the settings. See this page for info:

http://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-proxies.html