如何让 Maven 只下载所有（传递）依赖项的 POM 文件？

Question

I'm currently using the maven-dependency-plugin like

mvn -B dependency:copy-dependencies \
    -Dmdep.copyPom=true \
    -DoutputDirectory="$OUTDIR"

to download all POMs of all (transitive) dependencies. However, that is also downloading the JARs, which I don't want. I tried to use includeTypes / excludeTypes to limit to POM files only, but that didn't work as nothing is retrieved then.

Is there another option / command that really just retrieves the POMs?

Background: I only need the meta-data from all transitive POMs for compliance checks.

Answer 1

I ended up creating an Open Source project that downloads and gathers meta-data from Maven builds, and actually several other build systems , too. It's called OSS Review Toolkit (ORT for short) and programmatically uses the maven-resolver library to download only the POMs to analyze their contained meta-data.