Rationale

Maven is stuck on POM v4 for a long time now, because changing the POM version and publishing artifacts on Maven Central with this new model would break consumers using either older Maven versions or other build tools (that use POM v4 as a compatibility format).

Other build tools don't suffer from this issue: their build format is kept internal and a POM is produced only while publishing artifacts to Maven repositories, with information just for artifacts consumers but no build instruction.

Maven could apply same strategy: generate a consumer-only POM when publishing artifacts to a repository, with minimal information. The original POM is then called "build" POM since it contains instructions to build the artifact and the generated simplified POM is called "consumer" POM since it's intended for artifact consumers. Once this is done, we can have new build POM versions, which will require newer Maven versions to build, while consumer POM remains compatible with classical POM v4: the only requirement is to be able to generate a consumer POM (a simplified POM v4) from the original build POM used during build: flatten-maven-plugin has already proven that generating a simplified POM from the original POM and publishing it to Maven repository is feasible.

Consumer POM fields

First step is to define which fields from POM v4 we want to keep in consumer POM:

field	required for consumer	proposed for consumer	proposed for build only	comment
<modelVersion/>
<parent>
<groupId/> <artifactId/> <version/>
<packaging/>
<name/>
<description/>
<url/>
<inceptionYear/>
<organization>
<licenses>
<developers> <contributors>
<mailingLists>
<prerequisites>
<modules/>
<scm>
<issueManagement>
<ciManagement>
<distributionManagement>
<properties>
<dependencyManagement>
<dependencies>
<repositories>
<pluginRepositories>
<build>
<reports/>
<reporting>
<profiles>
<id/>
<activation>
<properties>
<dependencies>
<build>     <modules/>     <distributionManagement>     <dependencyManagement>     <repositories>     <pluginRepositories>     <reports/>     <reporting>