The plugins and the "tools" currently have completely independent lifecycles. Getting rid of the plugins would simplify our build for parent poms. We currently have a semi-circular dependency that forces to build and release, in this order:

• "super" parent pom
• plugins / tools
• "concrete" parent poms that configure the above plugins.
  The "tools" are merely files which we bundle in a jar which we use to further configure parent poms. Those could IMO follow the same lifecycle and versioning as the parent poms do.

Resolution:
The different parts of our build projects have been migrated to Git and merged into a single reactor project. However, they still have different lifecycles (i.e plugins don't need to be released with every version of the poms)
We might further change this with BUILD-182. Meanwhile, the build is using the -pl, -am and -amd flags of Maven. See README.txt for details.