So as you may know, there is this whole thread going on with Brian Fox and Sonatype about basepom which publishes POMs where some fields that are considered mandatory are not filled out because projects that inherit from them should not be "polluted" by these values cascading down.
The challenge for me (and I think the actual problem) is that there is dual use for some of these fields that are mandatory for distribution. E.g. "license" is used for the project license, but it also cascaded down to child projects as the license for them. Same for description or even the project name. I was thinking about this a bit and I wonder if we can actually solve this (or should solve it) at the tool level. It should be possible to a POM author to mark fields as "non-inheritable". So I can fill them out for distribution but I also know that they won't "bleed" into child projects inheriting. E.g. adding an attribute to the pom: <description cascading="false">This is a description that does not cascade to child projects</description> The default would be today's behavior (which is cascading down) but a pom author could add this attribute. I understand that this would be difficult in the maven 3 world due to the wide distribution of the POM model, but there may be an opportunity to get this into maven 4 before we finalize the first release (I think it will be hard after maven 4 goes GA). Opinions? -h
