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

If you're just wanting to inherit dependencies then I don't think it needs to be type 'pom'. You could have it jar and simply specify it as a dependency of the project which you have as child. However you wouldn't then have the parent/child relationship which is what prevents your parent project being a type other than 'pom'.

To be clear, you inherit the dependencies of all your dependencies ( transitive dependencies ).

Answer 2

As noted by Pascal, the behaviour is correct.

If you're still looking for means to share dependencies between modules, you can consider bundling up the dependencies in question into a pom, and then having your modules both depend on that new "dependencies" pom.

See Maven Book Section 3.6.1 for more details.

Answer 3

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).