title: Maven complaining about parent relative path
body: <p>Consider a maven project with modules consists of some utilities (jar) and some poms for others to reference to if they want to use some of these utilities.</p>
  
  <p>e.g. inside the parent pom.xml</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;artifactId&gt;project-parent&lt;/artifactId&gt;
  &lt;modules&gt;
    &lt;module&gt;client-ref-pom&lt;/module&gt; (a module with just one pom.xml)
    &lt;module&gt;server-ref-pom&lt;/module&gt; (a module with just one pom.xml)
    &lt;module&gt;client-utils&lt;/module&gt; (a module with some utility classes, needs to ref. client-ref-pom)
    &lt;module&gt;server-utils&lt;/module&gt; (a module with some utility classes, needs to ref. server-ref-pom)
    &lt;module&gt;utils&lt;/module&gt; (a module with some utility classes, needs to ref. project-parent)
  &lt;/modules&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So if there is another project wishes to use the utils, it will reference to ref-pom as its parent pom, so that the properties can be inherited. This purpose is served.</p>
  
  <p>The current issue is when the module utils also needs to reference to ref-pom as its parent pom (and ref-pom will ref. project-parent as its parent pom), maven is complaining about 'parent.relativePath' pointing to project-parent instead of ref-pom, suggesting to verify again the project structure.</p>
  
  <p>As that is just a warning, I can still compile the project, but I wonder the proper way to setup the project structure so that maven is happy and my purpose is served.</p>