We using in our department a big hierarchy of maven parents (like the apache community does). Some of these parents define useful plugins.
If I want to use the parents (and often this is a good idea, because the parents defining for example version informations for my dependencies), but I do not want to have a specific plugin invoked while I’am using maven, I can simple disable the plugin with follow configuration in my pom.xml:
...
<build>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<artifactId>thePluginArtifact</artifactId>
<groupId>thePluginGroup</groupId>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>the-execution-id</id>
<phase>none</phase>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>
</plugins>
</build>
...
The trick how to disable a plugin is to set the phase of the plugin to none.
