Maven Parent vs Dependency

 

Declare as dependency or as parent

Source URL: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8904251
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The two approaches are different, one is inheritance, and the other one is a simple dependency.

By dependency you'll only have the binary transitive dependencies of the project B.

By using as a parent project you'll inherit the configurations like plugins, building model, repositories, dependency-management, dependencies and so on, it depends on the case.

My rule of thumb is for scm configuration, project configuration, and development or company standards, I use a parent project (inheritance).

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