flink-connector-hive builds might be blocked (but not fail) because Maven tries to access conjars.org repository (which times out)

We (thanks to mdedetrich) experienced timeouts when building flink-connectors/flink-connector-hive because Maven tries to access http://conjars.org to retrieve meta information for net.minidev:json-smart which fails because the repository is gone.

gunnar.morling already described this in his blog post https://www.morling.dev/blog/maven-what-are-you-waiting-for/. The result is a 75s delay. This doesn't appear to happen in CI.

We investigated where this conjar repository is coming from. It turns out that the org.apache.hive:hive-exec:2.3.9 dependency derives from its parent org.apache.hive:hive:2.3.9 which pulls in the conjar.org repository:

<repository>
  <id>conjars</id>
  <name>Conjars</name>
  <url>http://conjars.org/repo</url>
  <layout>default</layout>
  <releases>
    <enabled>true</enabled>
    <updatePolicy>always</updatePolicy>
    <checksumPolicy>warn</checksumPolicy>
  </releases>
</repository>

The subsequent hive dependency org.apache.hive:hive:3.0.0 doesn't have this reference anymore.