Question about component descriptors and reuse

[Ryan Moquin <fr...@gmail.com>]

With the advice I've seen from you all, I've been working on learning how to
better decouple my builds by bundling resources and then sharing them out
with projects, and void the tendency to want to include paths between
dependencies, which can lead to broken builds.  This leads me to a question
that I haven't seen an answer to (I'm not sure if it's there staring me in
the face and I'm not noticing).  If you have a component descriptor that you
want to share amoung multiple projects that may be located in various
locations in your source tree and potentially not having the same parent,
how do you recommend doing it?  Basically, I have a distribution project
that creates a distribution and uses a common component descriptor.  I want
other projects that make special derivatives of that distribution to also
use that component descriptor, but I'm not sure how you would share it?  Are
there any best practices for that.  The component descriptors don't get
bundled into an artifact right?  Do you make a special artifact for them?

Thanks for any help!
Ryan