First, when creating the pom, you should use the distributionManagement element of the POM (see http://maven.apache.org/pom.html#Distribution_Management) for specifying repositories. The remoteRepository element that you specified is not a POM element but rather a sub element to the artifact:deploy ant task (which is how you correctly used it in the “workaround”). I agree that the error message you got is not crystal clear in that regard.

Also, if you specify the trim=”false” attribute on the writepom-task, it will write out the whole pom, by default it for some reason trims “unnecessary” information such as build configuration, repositories, and profiles. (See the bottom of http://maven.apache.org/ant-tasks/examples/write-pom.html for details).

Hope that helps.