Is packaging type 'pom' needed when not using project aggregation (multimodule)?

Question

I want to inherit the dependencies of a (parent) pom.xml in a child project in Maven 2.2.1; i.e. use project inheritance. It seems it is necessary to change the def

Answer 1

As documented in the Inheritance section of the POM Reference:

The packaging type required to be pom for parent and aggregation (multi-module) projects.

So Maven's behavior seems correct to me (and the error message is nicely self explaining).