I've racked my brain to come up with an ideal solution to this, without success, so I'm throwing myself on the mercy of the group. Any and all advice is greatly appreciated.
I have a project with many modules that are all released together; let's say they're in group ca.zac.A. The parent pom (also the aggregator) for the group defines dependencyManagement for all the child poms so that keeping versions consistent within the group and releasing them together is easy. So far, so good. But other projects might depend on a subset of the group, or have transitive dependencies on them, so I list the whole set of ca.zac.A modules in the dependencyManagement section of each such project: I want to be sure of keeping the versions consistent and known, and sometimes Maven's resolution ends up choosing mixed versions. But adding the whole set means I end up duplicating a large block of the POM in multiple projects. And if I add a new module that might get transitively included, then I have to update multiple places. I am looking for a way to centralize this information. 1) I can see from http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-3782 that using properties to affect transitive dependencies is not likely to happen any time soon, and I wholeheartedly agree that it's a bad idea anyway. 2) The idea of inheriting from the ca.zac.A parent pom worked with maven 2.1.0, but not well for other versions (and it smells bad anyway). 3) I *could* list them all in dependencyManagement in my "organizational parent" pom, with the version controlled by a single property, but then I'd have to update it whenever a new module is added to ca.zac.A. Having such a pom list a sizable set of my projects is probably workable, but it feels like I'm abusing it. 4) Multiple inheritance is not supported nor desired, and I understand that the planned "mixin" capability won't be around until post-3.0. I could have an intermediate parent pom, with just the dependencyManagement entries for my group, but in fact, I have more than one such set. So I'd have to put all such groups in one pom, and update it whenever ca.zac.A or .B or .C have a new module. This is probably my best option, but it still feels less than ideal: I'd rather be able to update a discrete place for each group. In practical terms, this isn't much different than putting it in the org parent, because I'd have to use this as the parent for most projects anyway. Am I stuck for now? Is there some other option I'm just not seeing? What I find myself wishing for is something like the following, and just have it apply to all the artifacts in the group (note that I would only ever want to do it for a groupId that I controlled): <dependencyManagement> <dependencies> <dependency> <groupId>ca.zac.A</groupId> <versionId>${ca.zac.A.version}</versionId> <!-- note no artifactId is listed --> </dependency>... Then in the child POMs I could just specify the ca.zac.A.version property. Is there a reason why something like this is a bad idea and would never happen? Or should I just go ahead and submit a request for it? It looks like there used to be a similar one at MNG-3633 (using wildcards), but that JIRA has vanished! Should I just grin and bear it until mixins in 3.1? If so, I'll see if there's some way I can contribute. Zac --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@maven.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@maven.apache.org
