Pavel> Are there other projects using pgjdbc-parent-poms?
Technically speaking, when building a Maven project, you need to have
full set of parent dependencies.
In other words, you have to have pgjdbc-parent-poms to know all
dependencies of pgjdbc.
Each and every project that uses pgjdbc, has to use pgjdbc-parent-poms
in one way or another.
pgjdbc-parent-poms is there to isolate common configuration parts and
enable it's own release schedule for that common part.
Ideally, pgjdbc-parent-poms releases should be very rare.
The main point of having parent-poms sepate is to share code between
java6, java7, and java8 build scripts.
We cannot release the same artifactid+version combo multiple times,
thus we have a dedicated "parent pom" configuration.
We cannot merge all the jre6, jre7, jre8 to a single project due to
maven's limitation: it would result in a case when you release
multiple versions of the same artifact id at once.
It is just not supported by Maven's default release procedure.
We cannot use Maven's classifiers as they break source.jar &
javadoc.jar integration in IDEs.
Dave> We can include them in the tar file.
That is a tricky question. "parent-poms" is a pgjdbc's internal
workaround for a specific Maven problem.
The only sane way of including "parent-poms" into a "main" tar file
would be such a way that would transparently work when building pgjdbc
as usual.
In other words: download tarball, untar, `mvn install` (just once).
If additional steps required, I think it is better to have a separate
tar for parent poms.
Vladimir