This is ultimately the same conclusion everyone (except the maven guys) seems to come to. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. See http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-1577.

Reinhard Poetz wrote:

Your changes make me think that we should move version declarations to our parent POM into the <dependencyManagement> section so that we have to manage it only at one location. (... just in the case somebody has some time left)