I noticed running the update command as such:

installer update --confirm --maven-repo-files=./maven-repo.zip 

It results in the install size increasing by all most double due to it populating the .m2 directory:

du -hs ~/.m2/ jboss-eap-8.0/
254M	/home/quickcluster/.m2/
286M	jboss-eap-8.0/ 

I found --no-resolve-local-cache seems to not cache it, as per the name it sounds like it would not try to use a local cache, though it seems to also have the effect of not creating a local cache as well.  Is this 1 option serving 2 purposes?

:read-operation-description(name=installer) , it looks like it is not an operation but help:

help installer update

    --no-resolve-local-cache  - Perform the operation without resolving or
                                installing artifacts from/into the local maven
                                cache. 

In the use case of updating a remote server, the footprint is doubled by default and the clean command does not clean up the cache. 

Also, the cache does not seem to be used: JBEAP-26283