I'm planning couple of changes to the Maven repository, with the goal of improving performance and making configuration a bit easier.

Use mixed http/https for the repository

Currently we're using only https for the repository.  We did this in order to keep the Apache configuration simple and make sure that the server is secure.  I'm planning to change this to a mixed configuration recommended by Sonatype so that only authentication requests will be passed over https.  All other requests (such as downloading artifacts) can be done over standard http.  Hopefully this will improve the download speed a bit.

https://jira.jboss.org/browse/JBBUILD-620

Add the proxy repositories to the public repo group

Currently the public group contains only our hosted repositories (jboss projects), and the developer group contains hosted repositoreis plus proxy repositories.  The reason we did this was to prevent anonymous users from using our bandwidth to download artifacts from the Maven central repo (http://repo1.maven.org).  However, this creates more complexity in the user/developer configuration because of the split.  Also it requires authentication to use the repository for most developers which also slows down the speed of handling requests.

After doing this, I will update the wiki documentation to describe the new recommended Maven settings which will be the same for both anonymous and authenticated users.

https://jira.jboss.org/browse/JBBUILD-616