Plugin dependencies for module ignored when building from aggregated project

• Complexity:

  Intermediate

I have defined a plugin in the build->plugins section in my pom. The plugin needs a plugin dependency to get a certain resource during execution (it is the maven-assembly-plugin that needs a custom descriptorRef that is located in another jar). When building the project from the module directory, everything works fine. But when I build the project from the parent aggregation from the module, it seems to ignore the plugin dependency of the plugin defined in the module and fails with an error that it cannot find my resource (in this case it does not find my assembly descriptor).

A work around is to also put the plugin dependency in the parent aggregation pom. The execution and configuration part can stay in the module pom. Now the module plugin will get the plugin dependency for this plugin from the parent. However, it also needs to stay in the module in case not building from the aggregation.