Unable to build dist projects with Maven 3

A NullPointerException occurs in the assembly plugin - it seems that the repository code in there has an incompatibility with Maven 3.

Will need to look into an alternative, or a fix to the assembly plugin.

This might cause problems for release at the moment because the site publishing requires Maven 3 - that'll need to be further extracted to a profile if we can't build the rest with Maven 3.