The check might have been useful at some point, but what I'm seeing these days is that it's terribly cumbersome:

• it's only done when you're actually performing the release, meaning you can lose a lot of time preparing it, for nothing
• the versions required by Maven are not easily installed with either brew or apt

mmuehlebach and I think either of the following should be done:

• remove the check completely
• enforce the check on all release steps
• let Jenkins do the release so we don't have to worry about correct local setups (longer story, but worth thinking about)