Ever had to deal with a really, really huge pom.xml? As soon as you start not only to declare the dependencies but also to add informations about the distribution (repositories, site), mailinglists or developers, the pom.xml starts to become really huge.

It is hard to find the informations you search. And it is much harder to find that revision a dependecy has changed if there is so much noise due to changes in other sections.
Many applications with huge configuration files started to convert their files into directories over the last years. Apache now has its “conf.d” directory, crontab uses “cron.d” and so on.

Why not take the same step, too? Why not split up the pom.xml into several files that are placed within a directory called “pom.d”?
So I have created a proposal for Maven 2.1.

What do you think?