Maven2 - problem with pluginManagement and parent-child relationship

Question

from maven documentation

pluginManagement: is an element that is seen along side plugins. Plugin Management contains plugin elements in much the same

Answer 1

I always used to think that a child POM can inherit a plugin definition from its parent's pluginManagement section and specify only the executions it wants to run from that plugin by referencing them by ID and binding the execution to a phase. As long as the parent definition is in pluginManagement (and not directly in plugins) and is not bound to a phase, only the specific execution (with ID) will be run in that phase.

From reading the above, and from my own current problem, it looks like that's not true: it looks like a child POM will inherit the entire configuration of the plugin, including all executions. In terms of executions, the only thing the child can do is to override specific values - it cannot pick which executions to run, and which not to.

Is this a bug? What's the use of being able to bind each execution to a phase (or not), if all executions will be run? I've only seen it with maven-dependency-plugin:unpack (bound to package phase), but with other plugins I might just have been lucky...

Damn.