How to set order of repositories in Maven settings.xml

None of these answers were correct in my case.. the order seems dependent on the alphabetical ordering of the <id> tag, which is an arbitrary string. Hence this forced repo search order:

            <repository>
                <id>1_maven.apache.org</id>
                <releases>  <enabled>true</enabled>  </releases>
                <snapshots> <enabled>true</enabled> </snapshots>
                <url>https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2</url>
                <layout>default</layout>
            </repository>

            <repository>
                <id>2_maven.oracle.com</id>
                <releases>  <enabled>true</enabled>  </releases>
                <snapshots> <enabled>false</enabled> </snapshots>
                <url>https://maven.oracle.com</url>
                <layout>default</layout>
            </repository>

As far as I know, the order of the repositories in your pom.xml will also decide the order of the repository access.

As for configuring repositories in settings.xml, I've read that the order of repositories is interestingly enough the inverse order of how the repositories will be accessed.

Here a post where someone explains this curiosity:
http://community.jboss.org/message/576851

Also, consider to use a repository manager such as Nexus and configure all your repositories there.