What is the difference between dependency-maven-plugin and maven-dependency-plugin?

Actually, they are the same, it's just that it was moved and renamed. The dependency-maven-plugin is hosted at Mojo while maven-dependency-plugin is hosted at Apache. The recommended plugin to use is the maven-dependency-plugin.

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When executing mvn dependency:unpack or dependency:copy from the command line, I get "One or more required plugin parameters are invalid/missing for 'dependency:unpack'"

In order for this to work, you must configure the ArtifactItems as shown here. Note that when executing a plugin from the command line, you must put the configuration tag outside of the executions. If you haven't done this correctly, the error will look like this:

[0] inside the definition for plugin: 'maven-dependency-plugin'specify the following:
      

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Why am I getting errors that a documented goal or parameter is missing?

The latest documents are published and may preceed the actual release. Check to make sure the goal/parameter is in the most recent version. -OR- Maven may be resolving the older codehaus version of the dependency plugin. See next question.

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Why is Maven resolving "dependency:xxx" to the older org.codehaus.mojo:dependency-maven-plugin?

Due to a bug in Maven in versions prior to 2.0.7 (MNG-2926) the search order was reversed and caused Mojo plugins to supercede ones with the same prefix at Apache. The metadata at mojo was cleaned up when the maven-dependency-plugin was released at Apache. If you are still experiencing this error, chances are you have old metadata in your local repository or in a proxy / internal repository. Removing /org/codehaus/mojo/maven-metadata.* from your repo/proxy will cause it to be refreshed. Alternatively, you can specify the groupId explicitely in your pom (if you are using a bound goal), or on the command line, use groupId:artifactId:version:mojo, ie mvn org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-dependency-plugin:2.0-alpha-4:unpack

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Why am I having trouble unpacking only a specific file?

The excludes will override the includes declaration. That means if you specify excludes=**/* ,includes=**/foo, you will exclude everything. If you only want foo, then just specify the includes. The plexus component used to unpack uses the following code to determing which files to unpack: return isIncluded( name ) AND !isExcluded( name );

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