I agree with Dirk. New user's want to build things out of the box and if they run into too many annoyances they'll just quit. Being a new user to Archiva, I'm speaking from experience.
As I understand it... The repository for the parent pom should be listed in the child pom unless it's available in central repository. The parent pom shouldn't be a snapshot and should just be a single version number References: Apache parent POM http://www.ibiblio.org/maven2/org/apache/apache/3/apache-3.pom Demystifying POM http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-05-2006/jw-0529-maven.html Better Builds with Maven http://library.mergere.com/
