WARN – Missing artifact descriptor for XXX

Working on an Arquillian test deployment which had some library changes recently, I ran into the following error.

WARN - Missing artifact descriptor for org.javassist:javassist:jar:3.16.1-GA

The particular library was in the pom.xml dependency hierarchy but it was resolving to an earlier  version. Maven was switched to offline mode during the tests and I had never needed this version of the library before. This meant  that the local version of my maven repository did not have jar and maven emits it slightly unhelpful error. It would be better if it told us that it could not find the artifact and since its in offline mode, can’t go and retrieve it.

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