One of the Apache Maven committers recently wrote about their plans for Maven 5. I consider the following one of the most significant changes: In summary, we need to make a distinction between two POM types: the build POM, stored in the project source control, that uses v5 schema for build time, requiring a new Maven version able to use the new features associated to the new schema,the consumer POM, that is published to Maven Central in the good old v4 schema, so every past or future build t