The "remote" archchetype-catalog doesn't really exist.

Not quite true. Central is meant only as "convenience" artifact source, nobody should use it directly anyway. All Maven users should use some sort of MRM (Maven Repository Manager, http://maven.apache.org/repository-management.html)

For example, using Nexus OSS or Pro (http://nexus.sonatype.org/) together with Nexus Archetype Plugin (https://docs.sonatype.org/display/Nexus/Nexus+Archetype+Plugin) gives you exactly that: "live" archetype catalogs. When you deploy an archetype, it immediately gets listed in catalog, and is available to all other consumers of the repository.

Ok, so i take back the "useless". However, the documentation is still wrong and highly confusing.

Nexus Archetype Plugin will maintain archetype-catalog.xml for a given repository, once archetype artifact is deployed to that repository. If Nexus managed repository is a proxy/mirror of central, it will cache artifacts from central, but only ones that were used through mirror of central. Using latest archetype trunk (2.0-alpha-5-SNAPSHOT), archetype artifact can not be used without being first in an archetype catalog. So, remote (central) and all archetypes in central repository (except ones listed in archetype plugin internal archetype catalog) are useless unless archetype-catalog.xml is generated and maintained in central repository.

Agree with Stevo, it's still pretty badly broken. MRM doesn't help much if you want to make your archetype available publicly to other users like many open source projects do. There was a discussion about this on Maven users list (http://markmail.org/message/remgjzpl2kdrd7ph?q=+Error+reading+archetype+catalog+http://repo1.maven.org/maven2&page=1&refer=2cb3yjsdlzym52vb) almost a year ago noting that repo1/repo2 should either just run archetype:crawl periodically or Sonatype's Nexus should push the catalog to repo1 but I don't know if either effort has gone anywhere. Considering archetype:create is already deprecated I think this is more than a minor issue. Right now, is there any better workaround than lobby archetype maintainers to include your archetype in the new version of archetype plugin?

Just submitted a patch for ARCHETYPE-273 which adds support for importing remote archetypes in local archetype catalog and repository; with that it would be possible to consume archetypes whose artifacts have (optionally) been deployed to central repo, with archetypes being listed in remote (not necessarily central repo) archetype catalog.

Hello Kalle,
More than lobbying the maintainers, consider enhancing the archetype list wiki page http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVENUSER/Archetypes+List.
I tell you that because the undocumented release process of the archetype plugin use that page to automatically create the internal catalog.

Regards,

Raphaël

Brilliant Raphaël, thanks for the tip!

I just fixed the archetype catalog of maven central: http://repo2.maven.org/maven2/archetype-catalog.xml