Maven and dependent modules

Question

Colleagues have been touting the wonders of maven and its magical dependency stuff but I\'m finding that it fails at what I would consider the obvious use.

Suppose I

Answer 1

Rich is totally right. What you describe is generally not the expected behaviour. Although, as stated by deterb, the Maven reactor supports partial builds if the modules are known by the parent POM.

Building with mvn install -pl B -am should also make (-am) B's dependencies (that is, A).

Anyway, module A must be a module of the parent POM.

(see Maven Modules + Building a Single Specific Module)