I'm trying to combine multiple maven-javadoc-plugin configuration stanzas such that child modules can append <link/> elements to those specified by the parent. This supposedly can be done by adding the attribute "combine.children='append'" to the <links/> element in the child module's <configuration/> element, like so: What actually happens is that the child module's configuration reflects only the single <link/>, and not any <link/> elements also defined in the parent. The output of mvn help:effective-pom bears this out. Putting the plugin configuration into the <build/> element instead of <reporting/> shows the correct combination occurring (except that the report is obviously not configured that way...). The attached tarball contains a barebones multi-module project that shows this bug, as well as the output of help:effective-pom in separate files. I've also included the output of mvn -X help:effective-pom in the file build.log.