Arquillian cannot find artifact with server configuration in local repository

This issue originated from RF-14056.

So here is a breakdown of the problem:
With RichFaces I need to tell Arquillian to use certain configuration files for each AS (namely Tomcat and WildFly) which I run tests against. Following code snippet is an example of how RichFaces (Showcase app) set up a profile with additional configuration for Arq:

<profile>
            <id>wildfly-managed-8-2-https</id>
            <activation>
                <property>
                    <name>integration</name>
                    <value>wildfly82-https</value>
                </property>
            </activation>
            <properties>
                <arquillian.launch.wildfly8>true</arquillian.launch.wildfly8>
                <arquillian.container.home>${project.build.directory}/wildfly-${version.wildfly82}</arquillian.container.home>
                <arquillian.container.distribution>org.wildfly:wildfly-dist:zip:${version.wildfly82}</arquillian.container.distribution>
                <arquillian.container.configuration>org.richfaces:richfaces-build-resources:zip:configuration-wildfly82-https:${version.richfaces}</arquillian.container.configuration>
                <showcase.war.classifier>jbas71</showcase.war.classifier>
            </properties>
            <dependencies>

Namely the following tag <arquillian.container.configuration> is what troubles me. Here we set an artifact (in a form of a ZIP file) which contains the configuration xml file. Obviously, we do have arquillian.xml, links are included at the end of description.

While this works just fine if tried locally, we are observing constant failures in our Jenkins release jobs. The exception says that the artifact was not found in any of the repositories. Originally this led us to the above mentioned RF-14056. As a resolution I added a specific dependency which downloads these artifacts into local repository before the tests (and therefore Arq.) kicks in. However the result is exactly the same:

WARNING: Failed downloading org/richfaces/richfaces-build-resources/4.5.8.Final/richfaces-build-resources-4.5.8.Final-configuration-wildfly82-https.zip from <repoName>

This is what actually made me create this issue - it is rather weird that the artifact is not used from local repo and instead is being downloaded.

Sadly I am unable to provide a sample for reproduction because as I said, we only see this behavior when we test release meaning the artifacts are only in the staging repository.

Links to our repos with settings:

• Showcase pom file links
  • declaring additional settings for arquillian
  • explicitly declared dep to download it beforehand
• arquillian.xml
• Jenkins job log

What we tried already and know its not the cause:

• Settings.xml file for maven which is used by Jenkins job is correct, that was inspected and works fine for all other jobs which do not require this config for Arquillian
• The repository indeed contains the zip files and they can be downloaded
• The way we declare the settings should be correct because it works locally

I know the explanation is a bit (rather a lot) messy, but so is my understanding of this problem because its hardly traceable and we have been dealing with it for quite a while now. Feel free to hit me for more info.