Maven how set absolute path for parent pom - maven

Question

with maven 3 i have a parent project at 'C:/travail/parent'.
I have several child-projects who, for various reasons, can change locations.
To make a war, the relativePath tag must be set.
<parent>
<groupId>framework.parent</groupId>
<artifactId>parent</artifactId>
<version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
<relativePath>C:/Travail/parent/pom.xml</relativePath>
</parent>
Question: How can I put an absolute path for the parent? The following doesn't work.
<relativePath>/C:/Travail/parent/pom.xml</relativePath>

Answer 1

You cannot use an absolute path for your parent pom, the name itself of the configuration entry is quite self explanatory (relative path).
From the official Maven model documentation for this element:
The relative path of the parent pom.xml file within the check out. If not specified, it defaults to ../pom.xml. Maven looks for the parent POM first in this location on the filesystem, then the local repository, and lastly in the remote repo. relativePath allows you to select a different location, for example when your structure is flat, or deeper without an intermediate parent POM. However, the group ID, artifact ID and version are still required, and must match the file in the location given or it will revert to the repository for the POM. This feature is only for enhancing the development in a local checkout of that project. Set the value to an empty string in case you want to disable the feature and always resolve the parent POM from the repositories.
Default value is: ../pom.xml.
You can't even use a shortcut or symbolic link for the same, distributed together with each and every module and pointing at the absolute file location, it would not work (and you shouldn't use such a trick anyway, even if it was going to work).
You can't even use a property as value placeholder of the relativePath element. Something like:
<parent>
<groupId>framework.parent</groupId>
<artifactId>parent</artifactId>
<version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
<relativePath>${path.to.parent}</relativePath>
</parent>
And try to inject it at build time like:
mvn clean install -Dpath.to.parent=C:/somewhere/pom.xml
Would simply not work, as also documented by the following Maven tickets:
MNG-2569: Expressions not evaluated inside
MNG-624: automatic parent versioning
The only reasonable use case for this configuration entry is, as mentioned in the official documentation, for flat-structured multi-module projects, where modules and parent project are located at the same directory level.
Otherwise, and more suitable for your use case, you should provide the parent pom as part of the shared Maven repository (if any) or require a maven install (so that it will be available in the local maven cache) of the parent project upfront for any new version before any required maven action on the children/module projects.