title: How does Maven resolve plugin versions?
body: <p>I'm reading <a href="http://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-plugin-resolution.html" rel="noreferrer">the docs</a> and still confused as to how Maven is deciding which versions of plugins to download.</p>
  
  <p>For example, consider this simple scenario:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>an empty local repository</li>
  <li>a default settings.xml</li>
  <li>run a simple maven command.  for example, <code>mvn archetype:generate</code> for the <code>maven-archetype-quickstart</code> as described in the <a href="http://maven.apache.org/guides/getting-started/maven-in-five-minutes.html" rel="noreferrer">Maven in 5 Minutes</a> doc.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>After running the command, the first thing Maven does is download a bunch of plugins.</p>
  
  <p>Some of the plugins Maven is downloading include:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>maven-clean-plugin-2.4.1  </li>
  <li>maven-install-plugin-2.3.1</li>
  <li>maven-deploy-plugin-2.5</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p><strong>Why those versions?</strong></p>
  
  <p>The most recent version of these plugins are:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>maven-clean-plugin-2.5</li>
  <li>maven-install-plugin-2.5.1</li>
  <li>maven-deploy-plugin-2.8.1</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I looked at the <a href="http://search.maven.org/remotecontent?filepath=org/apache/maven/plugins/maven-clean-plugin/maven-metadata.xml" rel="noreferrer">LATEST version metadata</a> for maven-clean-plugin and it's 2.5</p>
  
  <p>It's not that I necessarily want to force Maven to use different versions of these plugins, I just want to understand WHY it's resolving to those versions.</p>
  
  <p>I'm using Apache Maven 3.0.3</p>