I don't see them as getting passed to the JVM:
/usr/local/glassfish3/jdk/bin/java -Dmaven.home=/usr/local/apache-maven-2.2.1 -Dclassworlds.conf=/home/kbarlow/workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.m2e.launching/launches/m2conf929383344193547816.tmp -Dmaven.bootclasspath=/usr/local/apache-maven-2.2.1/boot/classworlds-1.1.jar -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -classpath /usr/local/apache-maven-2.2.1/boot/classworlds-1.1.jar org.codehaus.classworlds.Launcher -B -s /home/kbarlow/.m2/settings.xml test
In regards to necessity, I suppose it's not absolutely necessary but would be convenient. I typically use the standard Eclipse JUnit launch configurations to run unit tests individually while coding. However, we do have an automated build manager that is going to run unit tests through maven. So I was trying to make sure the unit tests were executing properly for an automated environment. In this particular instance, I was finding that some of my setUps and tearDowns were not configured properly to reset state and were interfering with other tests. It's proxying is useful for debugging to isolate problems.
Thanks.
Keith