The Maven POM files in io7m projects contain a fair amount of duplication with respect to each other. The (possibly not entirely rational) reason for this is that when I started moving projects to Maven about five years ago, I had an instinctive lack of trust for project inheritance after seeing what a disaster inheritance usually implies in object-oriented programming languages. Five years of experience, however, have taught me that in a non-Turing-complete description language such as Maven's POM, the problems usually caused by inheritance tend not to occur. I can't give any formal reasoning for this, it's purely anecdotal.
I've introduced inheritance in steps: The root POM of each project does most of the work, and then each of the POMs in the modules of the project specify the bare minimum extra information such as dependencies, plugin executions, etc. In practice, most modules just specify some dependencies and an OSGi manifest.
This is fine, but it does mean that the root POMs of all of the projects mostly contain the same few hundred lines of XML. If I make a change to the logic in one POM that I think would be useful in other projects, I have to make the same change in those projects too. Therefore, I'd like to complete the progression and move towards all projects inheriting from a common primogenitor POM. In addition I'd like to add in some extra information such as inserting the current Git revision into produced JAR files, and statically analyzing the bytecode of compiled files to ensure that semantic versioning rules are being followed. I had a fairly productive conversation with Curtis Rueden about some practical aspects of this (Curtis maintains a very large collection of projects that inherit from a common root POM) and I've made a first attempt at a new primogenitor POM. I'll try moving a few of the more recent leaf projects such as jregions to this new root and see how things work out.