parent.relativePath Warning is very misleading
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Key: MNG-5146
URL: https://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-5146
Project: Maven 2 & 3
Issue Type: Bug
Components: Errors
Environment: Maven 3.0.3
Reporter: Scott MacDonald
Priority: Minor
When a parent pom.xml is located in a sibling directory as the children, and
<relativePath> is not set in the <parent> element of the children, maven spits
out a completely bogus, very misleading, warning message.
For example, suppose com.fubar and com.parent are in sibling directories
(along with a bunch of other modules), and com.fubar specifies com.parent as
its parent, but does snot specify a parent.relativePath in it parent element.
When you run a build, you get the following...
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[WARNING]
[WARNING] Some problems were encountered while building the effective model for
com.fubar:jar:1234.5
[WARNING] 'parent.relativePath' points at com.someRandomModule instead of
com.parent, please verify your project structure @ line
10, column 11
[WARNING]
[WARNING] It is highly recommended to fix these problems because they threaten
the stability of your build.
[WARNING]
[WARNING] For this reason, future Maven versions might no longer support
building such malformed projects.
[WARNING]
The warning incorrectly states that the child pom has specified
com.someRandomModule (a completely unrelated module) as its parent when that
is completely not the case. The unlreated module, in this case, happens to be
an existing module in a differrnt sibling directory, but otherwise has no
relation whatsoever to the parent or child.
It would be much better to warn about the actual problem....
The actual problem is that maven first tries to resolve parent poms locally
based on the value of relativePath in the parent element of the child. IF it
does not find it there, it will then resolve the parent from the repos. The
current default value of relativepath is ../pom.xml (which in my case doesn;t
work because my parent is in a sibling directory)
The warning should be changed to something useful, such as....
[WARNING] Could not resolve parent pom locally using parent.relativePath value
of ../pom.xml. Parent pom will be resolved from local or remote repository.
To disable local parent pom resolution, specify <relativePath><relativePath> in
you <parent> element.
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