Maven2 inheritance

Question

If I have a parent pom and want to inherit this to several projects. I usually do this by adding in top of the project ... . What I do

Answer 1

What i don't like about this approach is that if something changes in my parent i have to edit all project which are inherited by that parent to modify the version number. Is there a better approach?

Yes there is! Have a look at the Maven Versions Plugin, specifically:

versions:update-child-modules updates the parent section of the child modules of a project so the version matches the version of the current project.
For example, if you have an aggregator pom that is also the parent for the projects that it aggregates and the children and parent versions get out of sync, this mojo can help fix the versions of the child modules.
(Note you may need to invoke Maven with the -N option in order to run this goal if your project is broken so badly that it cannot build because of the version mis-match).

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Edit: Of course, using Maven3 you can now have < version >-less < parent > elements in sub modules:

Developers working in multi-module or multi-pom projects won't have to specify the parent version in every sub-module in Maven 3. Instead, you can add version-less parent elements.

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