what does pomOnly() do in .sbt files?

Question

what does pomOnly() do in .sbt files?

For example,

"com.github.fommil.netlib" % "all" % "1.0" pomOnly()

Answer 1

Indeed, SBT reference guide does not seem to provide much info about pomOnly().

As per mvnrepository, the dependency "com.github.fommil.netlib:all" corresponds to an aggregate pom.xml:

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.github.fommil.netlib</groupId>
  <artifactId>all</artifactId>
  <version>1.0</version>
  <type>pom</type>
</dependency>

The call of pomOnly() in build.sbt indicates to the dependency management handlers that they should not look for jar libs/artifacts for this dependency, but only load the metadata from the aggregate pom.