For years Maven's import-comfiguration-only-by-inheritance behaviour has limited good, DRY design for build and configuration management for big projects.<p>Maven-Tiles, by Maurizio Pillitu (<a href="http://about.me/maoo" rel="nofollow">http://about.me/maoo</a>), brings a long expected game change to the table.<p>It will let you import build configuration by composition rather than inheritance - which enables much more flexible designs.<p>The project is still at a very early stage, but you can checkout the code and see for yourself.