Maven 2.0.9 comes with a long list of changes, fixes, and improvements. To give a bit more stability to your builds, defaults are now provided in the superpom for plugins bound by default to the lifecycle (as well as for a few other plugins that see fairly regular use). It's still a good idea to keep your plugin versions under control with pluginManagement declarations, but the defaulting of plugins in the superpom should bring more stability to small builds and new users.

A few other changes of note:

• In past versions, settings.xml was ignored if there was no pom present (like in archetype:generate). From here on out, all settings will be interpreted correctly.
• The webdav wagon is now included in the core bundle by default; so it's easier to deploy third party jars without a pom. You can still override the version of the wagon with an extension declaration within your pom.
• The plugin.dependency section can now override the dependencies specified by a plugin itself.

For all the details on fixes, changes and improvements with this release, find the release notes here.