m2Eclipse can't find parent POM from workspace index

"Cannot find artifact for parent POM" error.

Works: Simple parent/child relation where parent is <packaging>pom</packaging> and is actually the parent on the file system.

Doesn't work: Any configuration where <parent/> is not also the parent on the file system. Non-feasible work-around is to run "maven install" on the parent to include it in the local-repository, which resolves the error. Parent artifact is shown in the "Maven Indexes" Eclipse view regardless, so it should be resolvable from there.

Use-case: Typical parent project with separate modules. Building the parent project causes all included modules to also build, etc. No issues here. However, having the file-system parent also be the POM parent requires checking-out the parent from source control, which includes all child modules as well - making it practically impossible to check-out and work on only one module. Better approach would be the following layout:

• MyProject
  • MyProject_MavenParent
  • MyProject_Module1
  • MyProject_Module2

MyProject_MavenParent contains shared settings for organization, developers, repositories, properties, and default build, resources, and plugin settings. It is set as the parent POM to both MyProject, MyProject_Module1, and MyProject_Module2. This allows a user to only checkout MyProject_Module1 MyProject_MavenParent, MyProject_Module2 + MyProject_MavenParent, or the entire MyProject. This is currently not feasible given the error.

An alternate possible layout that also doesn't currently work:

• MyProject
  • MyProject_Module1
  • MyProject_Module2
• MyProject_MavenParent

There is the <relativePath/> element that can be used in pom.xml. While I've not tried this, it introduces unnecessary and undesirable "hard-coding" of paths, even when relative paths are used. User should be able to check-out different modules to different local paths, which would cause any such paths to not resolve.