Is the StaticLoggerBinder implementation necessary? I built Maven without and it seemed to work, the resulting version was able to build a couple of random projects and the console output was colored.

AFAIK, you have colors on messages, but not on levels: the specific logger is necessary for levels.
It's also necessary for colored error rendering.
Just look at MavenSimpleLogger and you'll see exactly these 2 features in this class

Understood, thank you. I've added a StaticLoggerBinder implementation but now SLF4J complains that there are two StaticLoggerBinder on the classpath (from maven-slf4j-provider and slf4j-simple). I'll try to shade slf4j-simple and remove its StaticLoggerBinder class.

It's better now, the levels and the exceptions are properly colored, and SLF4J no longer complains about the duplicate StaticLoggerBinder.

great, I'll merge your ideas with 75b23eb : removing the patching part will be a be a good benefit

issue tracked in https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MNG-6196

ideas added to the MNG-6196 branch in c2a8787 : no monkey patch any more
I kept dependency:unpack+build-helper:add-source instead of switching to shade because I prefer the resulting source jar

Thank you. The add-source trick is a bit problematic for the Debian packaging because we don't build the source jars, but we can live with a Debian specific patch using the shade plugin instead.

This one can be closed.

Resolve #7250