I have a fairly simple maven-ized Java project, but am having trouble getting my head around it.

My parent module defines a lot of Java classes (and dependencies) that I expect to be useful for several child modules. One of the child modules is dedicated to deploying a web app, so it needs a few extra classes (the servlets) plus everything from the parent module.

The file structure looks like this

 - parent
   - src
   - pom.xml
   - child
     - src
     - pom.xml

My parent pom looks like this:

<project>
  <groupId>my.group</groupId>
  <artifactId>parent</artifactId>
  <version>0.0.1</version>
  <packaging>pom</packaging>

  ...

  <modules>
    <module>child</module>
  </modules>
</project>

And the child looks like this:

<project>
  <artifactId>child</artifactId>
  <packaging>war</packaging>
  <parent>
    <artifactId>parent</artifactId>
    <groupId>my.group</groupId>
    <version>0.0.1</version>
  </parent>

  ...

</project>

Is this all I need to have the child know about the classes and dependencies defined in parent? It doesn't seem to be: eclipse gives compile errors, and running mvn clean package from parent folder or child folder results "cannot find symbol" messages any time a class from parent is mentioned.

What am I doing wrong?

java inheritance maven
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