Maven user settings.xml not merged with global settings.xml

Could you elaborate which setting defined in global settings.xml is ignored? E.g. defining <localRepository> path works for me as expected

profiles and mirrors at least.  there is a mirror defined in global settings.xml, and a profile that should be enabled by default but isn't even visible in the list of profiles.

hm, working fine here, please check if you set appropriate maven at File | Settings | Build, Execution, Deployment | Build Tools | Maven => Maven home directory

It's left on the default, ~/.m2/settings.xml.

I'm not sure if I've made the problem clear, the correct behaviour is that you let Maven point at the default user settings (~/.m2/settings.xml), it is meant to merge this together with the global Maven settings.xml (/etc/maven/settings.xml).  Intellij just reads the user settings.xml and ignores the global settings.xml.

it's clear, my question was about to check if you set the correct maven home in IntelliJ:

So, in your case, File | Settings | Build, Execution, Deployment | Build Tools | Maven => Maven home directory setting should look like "/etc/maven"

Can you confirm it?

No it's not set to that.  The Maven home directory setting is for where Maven itself is installed, I can't set it to /etc/maven because there is no Maven installed there, only the global settings.xml.  I don't know if this is a Linux thing that it puts the global settings in /etc/maven instead of $MAVEN_HOME/conf

Apologies, this appears to be a mess I've made on my own system.  The maven rpm uses /etc/maven/settings.xml because it symlinks ${MVN_HOME}/conf/settings.xml to it, but I was using a separate maven install (from a tarball) that does not have the symlink.

There does seem to be a different problem where it doesn't seem to 'see' changes to the symlinked file reliably, which is solved if I hard link to the /etc/maven/settings.xml file instead.