From my experience and Maven best practices there are two kinds of "parent poms"
"company" parent pom - this pom contains your company specific information and configuration that inherit every pom and doesn't need to be copied. These informations are:
Preparing this parent pom need to be done with caution, because all your company poms will inherit from it, so this pom have to be mature and stable (releasing a version of parent pom should not affect to release all your company projects!)
The intention is to be scalable to a large scale build so should be scalable to a large number of projects and artifacts.
Mutliprojects have structure of trees - so you aren't arrown down to one level of parent pom. Try to find a suitable project struture for your needs - a classic exmample is how to disrtibute mutimodule projects
distibution/
documentation/
myproject/
myproject-core/
myproject-api/
myproject-app/
pom.xml
pom.xml
A few bonus questions:
- Where is the best place to define the various shared configuration as in source control, deployment directories, common plugins etc. (I'm assuming the parent but I've often been bitten by this and they've ended up in each project rather than a common one).
This configuration has to be wisely splitted into a "company" parent pom and project parent pom(s). Things related to all you project go to "company" parent and this related to current project go to project one's.
- How do the maven-release plugin, hudson and nexus deal with how you set up your multi-projects (possibly a giant question, it's more if anyone has been caught out when by how a multi-project build has been set up)?
Company parent pom have to be released first. For multiprojects standard rules applies. CI server need to know all to build the project correctly.