cyclic reference with 2.1.0 that doesn't matter with 2.0.10

The situation is that we have a parent pom.xml (projectA in the attachment) which is the parent of every other project. One of the other projects is the one where we define global configuration files for e.g. Checkstyle & PMD checks (projectB in the attachment).

The cycle exists because projectA refers to projectB in the Checkstyle & PMD plugin configuration and projectA is the parent of projectB.

IMHO this shouldn't matter (as it as with Maven 2.0.10 and earlier) because projectA is only packaged as a pom and therefore the cycle isn't relevant.