Hi, everyone. I understand this list to be a general forum for Apache
Maven users, so as such I'm sharing some ideas I've had related to BOMs.
Over the years I've changed how I define "Bill of Material" POMs for my
large, aggregated projects. Recently I've settled on a pattern which I
feel is a refinement of the official Maven approach
<https://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-dependency-mechanism.html#bill-of-materials-bom-poms>
for putting together a BOM. I've described the technique in my blog post
I published today: /Improving the Maven Bill of Materials (BOM) Pattern/
<https://www.garretwilson.com/blog/2023/06/14/improve-maven-bom-pattern>.
Here's a summary.
Assuming we have a project `com.example:…` with aggregated subprojects
`com.example:foo` and `com.example:bar`, my technique uses the following
directory structure:
|pom.xml (BOM) parent-pom.xml ├── foo/ │ └── pom.xml └── bar/ └── pom.xml|
Interestingly the top-level BOM aggregates all three POMs: the two
submodule POMs as well as `parent-pom.xml` in the project root
directory. The two submodules `foo` and `bar` use `parent-pom.xml` as
their parent.
I see this bringing a couple of benefits over the official approach in
the documentation:
* Aggregated modules are easy to find—in the top-level POM where they
logically should be.
* Other project dependencies and configurations are located nearby, in
the `parent-pom.xml` file in the same project root directory as the
BOM, not relegated to a separate subdirectory.
The post goes into much more detail explaining the differences, with
example of the POM contents.
I'd be interested in feedback on this technique if you have any
comments—especially if you find a flaw in this approach.
Best,
Garret
