Maven and dependent modules

A reason I can think of that your desired behaviour hasn't been implemented is as follows:

Suppose I'm working on both projects A and B. Currently A is broken. If dependency resolution happened as you would like, I would never be able to build B until A was fixed. So I either have to roll back my changes to A, or focus on fixing A first. Either way possibly not what I want to focus on right now.

Generally B wants to work with the "last good" version of A, rather than the latest. Using the dependencies from the repository means they at least compiled ok (and hopefully the unit tests were run too).

Take a look at the Maven reactor plugin, in particular reactor:make, which builds a module and all of the modules which it depends on.

With the master POM:

~/scratch/pom.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">

    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

    <groupId>scratch</groupId>
    <artifactId>scratch</artifactId>
    <packaging>pom</packaging>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>

    <modules>
        <module>nipple</module>
        <module>cabbage</module>
    </modules>
</project>

And the module POMs:

~/scratch/nipple/pom.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">

    <parent>
        <artifactId>scratch</artifactId>
        <groupId>scratch</groupId>
        <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    </parent>

    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

    <groupId>scratch</groupId>
    <artifactId>nipple</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>

</project>

~/scratch/cabbage/pom.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">

    <parent>
        <artifactId>scratch</artifactId>
        <groupId>scratch</groupId>
        <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    </parent>

    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

    <groupId>scratch</groupId>
    <artifactId>cabbage</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>scratch</groupId>
            <artifactId>nipple</artifactId>
            <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>

</project>

I can issue mvn package in the root directory after clearing out my local repository and end up with all the modules built. (Into empty-ish JARs, but built.)

Maven seems to look for dependencies either in the repository, or in the build in progress. It will not automatically traverse your project structure when you're only building a single module, because it's not required that you even have the parent project on your computer, much less one directory above the current module. (The parent-child relationship isn't even bijective.)

A reason why this is so might be because a directory layout where the location of modules would be predictable is in no way mandatory. It's even somewhat common and acceptable that the layout for the above example be like this:

projects
|
+--scratch
|  |
|  +--scratch-parent
|  |  |
|  |  +--pom.xml [The POM of scratch:scratch:1.0-SNAPSHOT]
|  |
|  +--nipple
|  |  |
|  |  +--pom.xml [The POM of scratch:mod1:1.0-SNAPSHOT]
|  |
|  +--cabbage
|  |  |
|  |  +--pom.xml [The POM of scratch:mod2:1.0-SNAPSHOT]

In this case, the <modules> section of the parent POM would be:

<modules>
    <module>../nipple</module>
    <module>../cabbage</module>
</modules>

Notice that there is nothing saying which artifact ID is in which module. It just serves to tell Maven that these are filesystem locations where to search for other artifacts related to this build.