Or, How to Release WIthout the Release Plugin

The Process:

1. Prepare your branch or trunk for release by bumping your versions.
   1. Bump the version in your POMs, Java source, etc.  I do this with perl and find:
      perl -pi -e 's/1.2.0-SNAPSHOT/1.2.0.GA/g' `find . -name \*.xml -or -name \*.java`
   2. Then commit: svn commit -m 'Prepare 1.2.0.GA'
2. Tag your branch or trunk: svn cp -m 'Tag 1.2.0.GA' http://svn.jboss.org/foo/trunk http://svn.jboss.org/foo/tags/1.2.0.GA
3. Do a clean deploy.
   1. mvn clean install
   2. mvn deploy -DaltDeploymentRepository=jboss::default::file:///home/david/src/java/repos-maven2
4. Commit your new artifacts to the repository.
   1. cd /home/david/src/java/repos-maven2/org/jboss/groupId
   2. svn status and svn diff, verify everything is correct
   3. svn commit -m 'Release Foo 1.2.0.GA'
5. Return to your branch or trunk, and bump your versions for the next version.
   1. Perl and find: perl -pi -e 's/1.2.0.GA/1.3.0-SNAPSHOT/g' `find . -name \*.xml -or -name \*.java`
   2. Then commit: svn commit -m 'Next is 1.3.0'
6. Done.  The whole thing takes me 3 minutes.
   

The Details:

1. Before you can use this process, you need to have the repository (at least partially) checked out.  I do this with a non-recursive checkout:
   1. svn co -N https://svn.jboss.org/repos/repository.jboss.org/maven2 repos-maven2
   2. cd repos-maven2
   3. svn up -N org && cd org
   4. svn up -N jboss && cd jboss
   5. svn up foo (pull in the whole org.jboss.foo subtree)
2. I also have a shell script which replaces mvn deploy -DaltDeploymentRepository=jboss::default::file:///home/david/src/java/repos-maven2 with a shorter command mvn-deploy.
3. To prevent your aggregator module from publishing an artifact to the repository, add the following snippet (credit to Pete Muir):

            <plugin>
               <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
               <artifactId>maven-deploy-plugin</artifactId>
               <configuration>
                  <skip>true</skip>
               </configuration>
            </plugin>