How should I share Maven DepdendencyManagement from multiple sources?

Question

I have a Maven project multimodule project. Some of the modules create custom packaging for the libraries produced by the other modules. The packaging being used has its own suite of versioned dependencies that I need to play nice with.

As an example: my parent POM might have an entry for e.g. commons-codec:commons-codec 1.4, my "core-lib" POM includes it as a dependency (sans explicit version), and I want to make sure my packaging module bundles in the right version. However, the specific type of custom packaging that I'm using also needs e.g. log4j:log4j 1.2.15, and I want to make sure that when my packaging module runs, it also bundles the correct log4j version.

Here's the wrinkle: the example POM I'm working from for "project that makes {custom packaging}" uses a parent that's provided by the custom-packaging team. If I use their parent, I lose the version info for commons-codec. If I use my parent, I lose the version info for log4j.

Now, ordinarily if I ask "how do I make A and B depend on the same version", you'd answer "make A and B have the same parent, and include a dependencyManagementsection in the parent". My problem is, I need A, B, and C to depend on the same version, but I don't have any control over C.

I think this is what Maven "mixins" are meant to address, but of course they don't exist yet. In the meantime, what I've been doing is picking one parent, then copy-and-pasting the dependencyManagement section from the other POM, with a comment saying "make sure you keep this up to date". Obviously this is an ugly, ugly hack, but I haven't found another way to keep current with both sides.

Answer 1

For now, I'm going to accept the answer of "this is one of the really sucky things about Maven". Maybe this question can get updated when Maven 3.1 finally launches.

Answer 2

What about using the assembly plugin to pack up your artifact with all its dependencies and having your packaging module run on that instead? Then you're not trying any pom magic. It's just a matter of one project using the artifact from another project, like usual.

Answer 3

Could you not activate multiple profiles which have their own dependency section pulling in the required libraries when enabled. This allows some nice flexibility due to the ways that profiles can be activated.