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<p>This proposal is heavily inspired by the changes that are made to many linux applications within the last years. Apache, crontab, X11, php...<br />
My debian machine has 45 &quot;*.d&quot; directories within /etc...</p>

<h1>Problems with huge poms </h1>

<p>The pom.xml files I use, become really huge sometimes.<br />
Escpecially if developer informations and other &quot;static&quot; data is added, the poms start to grow really fast.</p>

<p>The informations described in the pom cover many different scopes and are changed with a different rate.</p>

<p>There are several shortcomings when only one file is used to store all those informations.</p>
<ul>
	<li>big (maybe unreadable) file </li>
	<li>many revisions due to many changes; results into
	<ul>
		<li>hard to track changes (ever tried to find the revision, a dependency has changed in?)</li>
	</ul>
	</li>
	<li>more (unnecessary) conflicts/merges in a multi developer setup</li>
</ul>

<h1>Proposal: &quot;pom.d&quot;</h1>

<p>Of course it is very easy for small projects to just create a small pom.xml. So I suggest to keep this possibility. But optionally it should be possible to create a directory called &quot;pom.d&quot;</p>

<p>All files within this directory are virtually merged to one pom.xml file. So it is possible to keep several files for different scopes. Best practices could be to create a file for dependencies (&quot;dependencies.xml&quot;), one for build configurations, another for the developers section. The file names should/could reflect the name of the xml tag they contain/represent.</p>

<h2>Benefits</h2>

<ul>
	<li> Changes can be tracked down much faster
	<ul>
		<li>searching for dependency changes only affects revisions of &quot;dependencies.xml&quot;</li>
	</ul>
	</li>
	<li>Lesser conflicts/merges necessary</li>
	<li>shorter files --&gt; easier to navigate and locate informations</li>
	<li><strong>template/shared files may be copied/linked into the directory</strong>
	<ul>
		<li>some other proposals ask for thinks that could be solved with this option very easily
		<ul>
			<li><a href="http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVEN/Templated+POM+Sections">http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVEN/Templated+POM+Sections</a></li>
			<li><a href="http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVEN/Terse+POM+Syntax+-+Design+Discussion">http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVEN/Terse+POM+Syntax+-+Design+Discussion</a></li>
			<li>...</li>
		</ul>
		</li>
		<li>this could be done using SVN copy / external definitions. But maybe there could also be added some kind of special references later.</li>
		<li>Adding hibernate/spring/myComplexDependency could be a one liner.</li>
	</ul>
	</li>
</ul>

<h1>Backward compatibility</h1>

<p>I suggest to keep the current behaviour and add the new pom.d directoy only as option to offer an easy way to migrate maven 2.0.x projects. Creating a new plugin that converts a pom.xml into a pom.d directory with several files within should be a task of only a few minutes.</p>

<p>Autogenerating a pom.xml for backward compatibility is an easy task too.</p>

<h1>Necessary changes</h1>

<p>Only the parsing code of the pom.xml must be changed.</p>

<p>One problem is, that there exist several 3rd party parsers (IDE integration etc.). But they should be able to implement the changes very fast.</p>

<p>Maybe it is necessary to change/extend the XML schema for those files. Could anyone provide some informations about this issue?</p>