Preface: I've taken over a historically grown multi-module maven project. Now it's time to clean up the dependency versions. Since using version ranges has its problems (first of all, they don't work according to specs; second, they remove the reproducability of a build), I'm moving to introduce the versions-maven-plugin (v2.7).
Currently, I'm trying to get it to update the versions of dependency artifacts using the goal versions:use-latest-releases. It works for the most part, but it keeps finding beta versions to update to -- I'm surprised that they apparently count as "release". I managed to configure the plugin in the super parent pom (a pom.xml in a pom-packaged artifact appropriately named super), which all modules and submodules refer to as parent (sometimes indirectly). I found the option to refer to an xml file containing rules to ignore specific versions or version patterns -- sadly, I cannot put the rules directly into the super parent pom (or I haven't found the option yet).
So here's the question I ended up with: How do I reference a file (according to the docs: "using a wagon URI or classpath URI") that sits next to the pom.xml of the super parent artifact which is packaged in pom format to be installed in Nexus? According to my research, this is not possible.
So let me put it broader: How do I centrally configure the versions-maven-plugin across a multi-module maven project tree to ignore all versions matching the regex .*-b.*?
Ideally, I would not even have to import the super project into my workspace nor have that file laying around on a webserver (I want it associated with the super project, not flying around somewhere).
