Question

This is my first question on StackOverflow. Learnt quite a bit reading other Q&A so far.

Question is about Maven Multimodule.

Following is my project strurcture:

commons-parent
|--pom.xml
|--commons-module1
   |--pom.xml
   |--core
      |--pom.xml
   |--cli
      |--pom.xml

cli stands for command line interface.

commons-module1 is a library to be used by different projects within company.
commons-module1/core contains the pom which packages only the library classes.
commons-module1/cli contains the pom which packages the command line test programs.

commons-parent/pom.xml (relevant snippet):

<groupId>com.abc.def</groupId>
<artifactId>commons-parent</artifactId>
<packaging>pom</packaging>
<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>

<profile>
    <id>reactor</id>
    <properties>
        <env.type>dev</env.type>
    </properties>
    <modules>
        <module>../commons-module1</module>
    </modules>
</profile>

there is a distribution management section 
but there is no repositories section in pom.

commons-module1/pom.xml (relevant snippet):

<parent>
    <groupId>com.abc.def</groupId>
    <artifactId>commons-parent</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
</parent>   

<groupId>com.abc.def</groupId>
<artifactId>commons-module1</artifactId>
<packaging>pom</packaging>
<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>

<modules>
    <module>cli</module>
    <module>core</module>
</modules>


there is a distribution management section 
but there is no repositories section in pom.

commons-module1/core/pom.xml (relevant snippet):

<parent>
    <groupId>com.abc.def</groupId>
    <artifactId>commons-module1</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
</parent>   

<groupId>com.abc.def</groupId>
<artifactId>commons-module1-core</artifactId>
<packaging>jar</packaging>
<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>


there is a distribution management section 
but there is no repositories section in pom.

commons-module1/cli/pom.xml (relevant snippet):

<parent>
    <groupId>com.abc.def</groupId>
    <artifactId>commons-module1</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
</parent>   

<groupId>com.abc.def</groupId>
<artifactId>commons-module1-cli</artifactId>
<packaging>jar</packaging>
<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>


there is a distribution management section 
but there is no repositories section in pom.

Environment:

 Apache Maven 2.1.0 (r755702; 2009-03-18 19:10:27+0000)
 Java version: 1.6.0_25

Problem Description:

When a project needs to depend on commons-module1-core, project will have a maven
dependency in pom as follows:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.abc.def</groupId>
    <artifactId>commons-module1-core</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>

This only works (i.e. dependencies satisfied) when the complete hierarchy
commons-parent,commons-module1,commons-module1-core all three are in local repository.
It doesn’t work if I have any of them missing in local. We have nexus repository manager
set up. So, my expectation was that, the project making use of commons-module1-core library
can just declare above dependency snippet in their pom and through transitive dependency
resolution, get the parent poms.

Am I missing something here?

EDIT

For a simpler use case which I think is similar to my problem – see this unanswered question:

Child not finding parent pom in flat structured multi module maven build

Answer 1

First of all, update to Maven 3.0.3 as soon as possible…2.1.0 has many bugs and will not be mantained any more.
Second you are misusing some parts of the pom you always wrote:

<parent>
    <groupId>com.abc.def</groupId>
    <artifactId>commons-module1</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
</parent>   

<groupId>com.abc.def</groupId>
<artifactId>commons-module1-core</artifactId>
<packaging>jar</packaging>
<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>

But you should do it the following:

<parent>
    <groupId>com.abc.def</groupId>
    <artifactId>commons-module1</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
</parent>   

<artifactId>commons-module1-core</artifactId>
<packaging>jar</packaging>