Last week Dennis started things moving to have another release of the Maven Release Plugin. The release process should start very soon, so please join us on dev@maven.apache.org to help test it!
This is certainly a nice one to have out the door, not only because of the length of time since the last release but because it fixes some important bugs (Subversion 1.6 support for starters), and improves multi-module support.
Having been bitten by the latter category myself very recently I took the opportunity to get a couple of changes in.
Support for flat directory multi-module projects
This highly requested support was actually added by Deng way back in May last year, but it was only recently that I started using the new version of the plugin and discovered a small corner case I jumped in and made a couple of improvements and fixes.
While I would always recommend using a typical hierarchical Maven multi-module project, there are a number of existing projects using the flat structure, particularly in non-Java environments. It’s good that the release plugin can now support anything with a common trunk.
This means that projects like the following will now release correctly (run from the parent directory):
.
|-- release-parent
| `-- pom.xml
|-- release-module2
| `-- pom.xml
`-- release-module1
`-- pom.xml
Not requiring artifacts to be in the local repository before releasing
This controversial issue has popped up a number of times and proven to be a real nuisance in releases, where a multi-module project needed to be built locally before it can be released (including the preparation test, that makes 3 full builds!), or at best spouted a large number of warnings about missing dependencies on the artifacts it was yet to build.
In the end here we decided to revert to the original behaviour and accept the limitations that came with, while making the typical release faster and easier. The release:prepare-with-pom goal has been added to cater to the use case for which the dependency resolution was put in place originally. With this intended to be the 2.0 release of the plugin, we can stick to this behaviour going forward.
In the future, Maven 3.0 has added additional capabilities for plugins to operate with their modules without building them first, which will allow a unified and enhanced release:prepare goal once more, but in the mean time we’ve opted to put in place the best solution for the majority of Maven users today.
Brett Porter 