The AS build spits out WARN message about the missing pom and also fails to build sometimes with this error:

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal on project jboss-as-depchain: Unable to get dependency information for ws-commons:policy:jar:1.0: Failed to retrieve POM for ws-commons:policy:jar:1.0: Error transferring file: Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://repository.jboss.org/nexus/content/groups/public/ws-commons/policy/1.0/policy-1.0.pom
ws-commons:policy:pom:1.0

Paul Gier suggested that we remove this dependency from the build. Here's the mailing list discussion:

<quote>
This is due to a missing POM in the upstream repo. It seems that Maven
fails intermittently due to this missing POM. I'm not sure why Maven
isn't consistent in either failing or succeeding. Cleaning out the
local repo will probably fix it temporarily.

Anyway, I think the correct solution is the update the dependency since
this is a very old jar anyway and has been replaced (including in EAP)
by Neethi [2]

[1]http://repo2.maven.org/maven2/ws-commons/policy/1.0/
[2]http://ws.apache.org/commons/neethi/

</quote>

Also note that, this dependency on ws-commons:policy:pom:1.0 adds up to the build time since I see Maven trying to check for this pom in the remote repo, every now and then during the build.