title: Maven Inheritance and Distribution Management
body: <p>I have developers who use Maven parents external to my organisation. For this particular case the parent is the spring-boot-starter-parent</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;parent&gt;
      &lt;groupId&gt;org.springframework.boot&lt;/groupId&gt;
      &lt;artifactId&gt;spring-boot-starter-parent&lt;/artifactId&gt;
      &lt;version&gt;1.4.1.RELEASE&lt;/version&gt;
      &lt;relativePath/&gt; &lt;!-- lookup parent from repository --&gt;
  &lt;/parent&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Their builds are working and they have been testing against these dependencies for a long time, I ideally do not want to change their inheritance.</p>
  
  <p>The problem I have as a Release Engineer is that the artifacts produced need to be stored in an internal Maven Repository. We've historically done that by having a Maven Parent that defines the  and nothing else, that all projects had as the root of their inheritance chain.</p>
  
  <p>I could end up managing hundreds of POMS and I don't want to put  in each one as if we have to move the internal Maven repository I will have to manage a ridiculous number of projects to reflect the change.</p>
  
  <p>Is there any way I can set  where I essentially don't have write access to parents? Can this be set in MAVEN_OPTS or as a properties file on the CI servers? I have tried using <strong>properties-maven-plugin</strong> to input all of our properties but distributionManagement won't accept a property as a variable.</p>