Error message when releasing (mvnw deploy -Prelease)
Can you please get a stack trace with mvn -e?
Apparently org.sonatype.aether is obsolete, and has been replaced by org.eclipse.aether: https://stackoverflow.com/a/17686482
So apparently we have some sort of problem with our plugin dependencies being too old. We might need to ensure that maven-dependency-tree is at least 2.1: https://stackoverflow.com/a/17686482
This shows a plugin which pulls in maven-dependency-tree-1.2.jar:
Try updating maven-project-info-reports-plugin to at least 2.7, as mentioned here: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAVEN/AetherClassNotFound
This makes sense, because I think maven-project-info-reports-plugin (would be invoked via the site plugin) when using mvn deploy.
If that doesn't do the trick, it might be a good idea to try updating all our Maven plugins.