There are many mirrors of the Central repository out there, but they are mostly under-utilized. I believe this occurs for two reasons:
- Users don’t know they exist – it’s not easy to find a good source for these URLs and locations.
- Users don’t have confidence in the mirrors – They don’t know how frequently they are updated, and don’t have an easy way to validate they are the same files that exist on Central.
In Nexus 1.3, we have introduced new functionality to solve both of those problems.