It'll be great if I could just check out the CVS head / SVN trunk of a project by something like mvn svn:checkout -DgroupId=myGroupId -DartifactId=myArtifactId Maven would get the latest associated POM, read the repository location from the SCM entries, and proceed with checking out as you would expect it. Then, I'd just have to cd to the newly created directory and issue mvn eclipse:eclipse (or the equivalent for your favourite IDE) This enhancement is also targetted at the M2 plugin, for which I did not find any JIRA project.