Remove the Jetty 6 pluginManagement entry and the unbuilt archetype-samples tree

Start with the root pom.xml and inspect its pluginManagement entry, then review the archetype-samples tree and its webapp/pom.xml. Remove the obsolete Jetty entry and the unbuilt tree together; done means the four current modules remain unchanged and no build reference to archetype-samples remains.

Spun out of the estate-wide Jetty review in apache/maven#12768, which was triggered by the Jetty 9/10/11 end-of-life announcement in jetty/jetty.project#13918. This one is not covered by that announcement — it is older than the versions it covers — but it turned up in the same sweep, and it is cleanup rather than risk.

What is there

The root pom.xml pins org.mortbay.jetty:maven-jetty-plugin:6.1.26 in pluginManagement.

org.mortbay.jetty is the pre-Eclipse groupId, and 6.1.26 is the last release ever made under it — November 2010.

Why it can probably just go

Nothing in the build uses it. The only reference is archetype-samples/webapp/pom.xml, in a jetty profile with <defaultGoal>jetty:run</defaultGoal>, and archetype-samples is not part of the build:

• it is not listed among the four <module> entries (archetype-models, archetype-common, maven-archetype-plugin, archetype-packaging)
• it is excluded from RAT (<exclude>archetype-samples/**</exclude>)
• its own parent is org.apache.maven.archetypes:archetype-samples:2.0-alpha-5-SNAPSHOT, a version that was never released, so the tree would not build even if someone tried

To be clear about what this is not: the released archetypes live in apache/maven-archetypes, so no generated project inherits any of this. The only theoretical reach is that our root POM is published and its pluginManagement is inherited by anything declaring it as a parent — which, outside this repository, is nobody.

Suggestion

Delete the pluginManagement entry and the archetype-samples tree together. The samples reference a 15-year-old Jetty and a tomcat:run profile from the same era, and they have been unbuildable for long enough that nobody has noticed.

If someone wants the samples kept, they need a live parent and a place in the build; a sample nobody compiles is a sample nobody maintains.

Small and self-contained — reasonable for a first contribution.

This issue was created with AI assistance.