Alpha 7 requires parent pom of artifact referenced for compilation

While evaluating the latest alpha release for our environment we found that alpha-7 suddenly requires the availability of the parent pom of an artifact.

The pom in question references an artifact as normal dependency without explicit scope (plain GAV). The pom of that artifact references a parent that really does not exist in any repository. With alpha-7 the build fails complaining about that parent. With alpha-6 the build works fine.

Looking at the changes for alpha-7 I don't see any indication that this was intentionally done, so I rather consider this to be a bug. (Increases number of lookups required and I don't see any necessity for the availability of the parent, but maybe I'm missing something here).