Patrick, I've solved the problem for now by "sharing" the content of the subprojects to subfolders of the master project (we're using starteam but the same could be done with svn external projects). This enables us to have an aggregator pom sitting on top of the subprojects, allowing cross-projects release management. We can also checkout all files from all required projects in one swoop, thereby creating a unified "workspace" for each dev branch. One problem is that labels (tags) created in the meta-project do not propagate to the subprojects.
I haven't investigated the Plugin option other than in thought. Can modules be programatically defined by a plugin? The problem is that this plugin would end up overlapping a lot of functionnality already in other plugins (scm, release, etc). Unless there is a way to hook it up inside Maven to provide transparent redirection for these other plugins. Keep me posted! Francis
