When is it safe to delete the local Maven repository?

Question

In which circumstances is it safe respectively unsafe to rm -rf ~/.m2/repository provided that I\'m working online and I have access to all needed artifacts via

Answer 1

When you retrieve all dependencies from remote repositories, then the local repo becomes nothing more than a cache.

Like all caches, the Maven local repo can occasionally become "dirty". In an acknowledged act of paranoia and overkill, I schedule a periodic cron job to purge the local repositories on my build machines. This forces a re-sync with my Nexus Maven repository.