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

 Inheritance is recursive in Maven but there is a special model which is the implicit super parent in the lineage
 of models you may specify:

        <plugin>
          <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
          <artifactId>maven-release-plugin</artifactId>
          <version>2.0-beta-4</version>
          <configuration>
            <!-- This element will be overridden by children -->
            <tagBase>https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/maven/pom/tags</tagBase>
            <useReleaseProfile>false</useReleaseProfile>
            <goals>deploy</goals>

  The majority of mojos will leave the requiresOnline == false,
  since online/offline status will be irrelevant, provided they have
  access to their required artifacts and other classpath elements. In the case
  of required artifacts and other classpath elements, this is assumed by the
  mojo API to be in a correct state, and will be handled by the Wagon
  modifications.


* Implementation Notes

** Accessibility of offline status

        <plugin>
          <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
          <artifactId>maven-release-plugin</artifactId>
          <version>2.0-beta-4</version>
          <configuration>
            <!-- This element will be overridden by children -->
            <tagBase>https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/maven/pom/tags</tagBase>
            <useReleaseProfile>false</useReleaseProfile>
            <goals>deploy</goals>

 various properties files. What needs to be done is to encapsulate all of this in the POM.

 Typically users parameterize the use of plugins, or have custom values like ${user.name}
 for use in elements like the <developerConnection/>. It would be idea if we
 could encapsulate everything we need about the project in the POM including
 plugin parameters and anything else.

Once we have the version of the plugins the appropriate call to the plugin manager can be made to get the MojoDescriptor for the goal that needs to be run. In the MojoDescriptor we are interested in the <configuration/> element and <parameters/> element. From these elements we need to make a component configuration for the MojoExecution. The actual DOM like structure we create is of type PlexusConfiguration and is the type we use with the ComponentConfigurator to initialize fields in a Plexus...