Is maven-download-plugin not portable, or am I crazy? - maven

Question

TL;DR: I stumbled upon a situation where my pom.xml works fine on Windows, but fails on Linux. Since I'm rather new to maven, I'm not sure whether it's a common situation, or if I messed up somewhere.
More details:
I use the maven-download-plugin like this:
<plugin>
<groupId>com.googlecode.maven-download-plugin</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-download-plugin</artifactId>
<version>1.1.0</version>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>get-stuff</id>
<phase>generate-sources</phase>
<goals>
<goal>wget</goal>
</goals>
<configuration>
<url>http://myUrl/my.tar.gz</url>
<unpack>true</unpack>
<outputDirectory>${project.build.directory}</outputDirectory>
</configuration>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>
<plugin>
On Windows it works like a charm (ie: it downloads and unpack).
On Linux, it fails with the following error:
[ERROR] Failed to execute goal com.googlecode.maven-download-plugin:maven-download-plugin:1.1.0:wget (get-moab)
on project my-project: Execution get-stuff of goal com.googlecode.maven-download-plugin:maven-download-plugin:1.1.0:wget failed:
An API incompatibility was encountered while executing com.googlecode.maven-download-plugin:maven-download-plugin:1.1.0:wget: java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: org.codehaus.plexus.util.cli.Commandline.createArg()Lorg/codehaus/plexus/util/cli/Arg;
I found a workaround (<unpack>false</unpack>, and then "manually" unpack with antrun), but my pom.xml looked better without those additional 15 lines...
To put it in a nutshell:
Is it actually a portability issue, or have I messed up somewhere?
If it's an portability issue: is it common with maven, or am I unlucky on this one?
More technical details:
I used the same plugin both on Linux and Windows (same version, same maven repository)
It failed on a Centos, and a VM with Ubuntu 12.04

Answer 1

My first troubleshooting step when a build works on one machine and not another is to clean out the local Maven repository on the failing machine, and let Maven re-download all of the artifacts. That's often enough to fix the problem.
If the build fails with the same error, then I clean out the local repository on the working machine and build. Usually then I see that I've missed a dependency in the POM that just happened to exist in my local repository already. Fixing the POM often makes the build work on both systems.

Answer 2

Did you check the Maven versions (mvn -version)? org.codehaus.plexus.util is a dependency of Maven Core, so if maven-download-plugin is running under a different version of Maven it was compiled for, this would explain the error.