~~ under the License.

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 Inheritance in Maven
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 The Maven Team
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Inheritance in Maven

 In order the understand how inheritance works in Maven there are a few notions that you must be familiar with:

 * The maven super model

 * how parent poms are processed

 * the order in which elements in the POM are overridden

 * minimum element-set for a valid project pom


Maven super model

  2005-04-29

Abstract

  We're moving toward integrating mojos as first-class plexus components, while
  at the same time avoiding introducing required plexus dependencies into the
  mojo development model.

  In order to really achieve this, we need mojo configurations (which are
  provided both in terms of static expressions that are just looked up, and
  in terms of user-provided configuration from properties or the POM).

   on plugin goals execution order:

   * <<in a given phase, goals order is not expected to be guaranteed nor finely tuned>>:
     it is just a consequence of the order obtained during {{{../maven-model-builder/}effective model building}},
     which combines profile activation+injection and inheritance assembly from parents,

                    </execution>
                </executions>
            </plugin>
            <plugin>
                <!--
                A plugin which uses the JUnit framework in order to start
                our junit suite "AllTests" after the sources are compiled.
                -->
                <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>${surefireVersion}</version>

h4. Generation of plugin metadata and packaging

To create the packaging for a plugin a special Maven packaging would be created with an accompanying life-cycle in order to create the plugin metadata required and create an archive of the plugin that can be consumed at runtime.

fields in a Plexus component. Typically this is done within Plexus with the configuration supplied with component configuration, but in Maven we take configuration values from the POM. So we have to use the ComponentConfigurator outside of Plexus in order to configure the Maven Mojo which is just a Plexus component. We can use the information from the MojoDescriptor along with the merged configuration information that is now present in the POM to create the complete PlexusConfiguration used to populate...