title: Locating the project.parent's POM
body: <p>I'm using Maven in a project which contains a number of modules.  When we release, <strong>we deploy the modules to our own Maven repository</strong>.  The project modules inherit from a parent project which defines common properties such as reporting tools to be used, SCM location, repositories etc.</p>
  
  <p>./pom.xml</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;project&gt;
      &lt;groupId&gt;com.example&lt;/groupId&gt;
      &lt;artifactId&gt;parent&lt;/artifactId&gt;
      &lt;version&gt;1.0&lt;/version
      &lt;repositories&gt;
          &lt;repository&gt;
              &lt;url&gt;repo.example.com&lt;/url&gt;
              ...
          &lt;/repository&gt;
      &lt;/repositories&gt;
      ...
  &lt;/project&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>./module/pom.xml</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;project&gt;
      &lt;groupId&gt;com.example&lt;/groupId&gt;
      &lt;artifactId&gt;module&lt;/artifactId&gt;
      &lt;parent&gt;
          &lt;groupId&gt;com.example&lt;/groupId&gt;
          &lt;artifactId&gt;parent&lt;/artifactId&gt;
          &lt;version&gt;1.0&lt;/version&gt;
      &lt;/parent&gt;
      ...
  &lt;/project&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>It turns out there's an issue with this setup: when someone joins the project and tries to build a module, it will fail.  This is because <code>parent</code> <strong>will not be available in their local Maven repository</strong>, and cannot be fetched because <code>repo.example.com</code> <strong>is only defined in the parent POM</strong>.</p>
  
  <p>Is there an obvious way round this problem, bar defining <code>&lt;repositories/&gt;</code> in every module's POM?</p>