subrelease-maven-plugin

This plugin provides an enhancement over the usual maven-release-plugin by releasing any snapshot dependencies altogether.

In a perfect world, maven-release-plugin would easily help you release your awesome project. Consider the following release phrases designed by maven-release-plugin

Preparing a release goes through the following release phases:
* Check that there are no uncommitted changes in the sources
* Check that there are no SNAPSHOT dependencies
* Change the version in the POMs from x-SNAPSHOT to a new version (you will be prompted for the versions to use)
* Transform the SCM information in the POM to include the final destination of the tag
* Run the project tests against the modified POMs to confirm everything is in working order
* Commit the modified POMs
* Tag the code in the SCM with a version name (this will be prompted for)
* Bump the version in the POMs to a new value y-SNAPSHOT (these values will also be prompted for)
* Commit the modified POMs

But in reality, you may actually have to live in a cold weird place, where release phases above may not applicable, especially the second bullet above. Before maven-release-plugin perform a release, it mandates you to solve this problem, which is tiresome if you have many of them.

You're also right that this problem may be resolved by going as multi-module, so that it would release all of those dependencies for you. But didn't I just say about a cold weird place?

subrelease-maven-plugin is built to get rid of the limitation of the second bullet above, by automatically release all of those SNAPSHOT dependencies for you. Therefore, we could rewritten the release phases as:

• Check for SNAPSHOT dependencies
• Release those SNAPSHOT dependencies
• Update POM to use released version instead of SNAPSHOT
• Goes through the perfect release phases of maven-release-plugin

Usage

Install

At the moment, choose either #1 or #2

1. Clone this project, then executes mvn install to install this plugin into your local repository
2. Download 0.2.0.zip plugin, then unzip it to your local repository

Please also make sure your system has M2_HOME configured properly

Command

mvn clean com.github.manat:subrelease-maven-plugin:[version]:[goal]

For example:

mvn clean com.github.manat:subrelease-maven-plugin:0.2.0:prepare

Please note that clean command is recommended.

Goals

There are 1 available goal at the moment:

• prepare to release any SNAPSHOT dependencies, then updating current pom.xml to be ready for releasing

prepare

It performs the following steps:

1. Resolves a list of snapshot dependencies. If there is none, then the prepare process is finished
2. For each of dependency
3. Verifies if this dependency has already been released
4. Otherwise, performs a release
5. If release succeed, performs a deployment. If dependency's pom doesn't include a valid <distributionManagement/> section, this step will fail. If you cannot include the section, an alternative fix is to include altDeploymentRepository option when executing this command. See performing the release guide for more details.
6. Once all of the snapshot dependencies are released, the project's pom will be updated to use released version instead of SNAPSHOT for those belong to #2
7. Commit change of pom

Please note that prepare goal can be run repeatedly until #3 is satisfied.

Optional Parameters

• scmCommentPrefix - The message prefix to use for all SCM changes.
• altDeploymentRepository - Specifies an alternative repository to which the project artifacts should be deployed ( other than those specified in ). Format: id::layout::url. For example, personal::default::file:///home/vader/.m2/repository .See maven-deploy-plugin for clarification.

Contribution

There is A LOT that you could help.

1. Use the issue tracker to contribute ideas, or reporting bugs
2. If you have code to contribute
3. Push your changes to a topic branch in your fork of the repository.
4. Submit a pull request to the repository
5. If things go well, then everyone is happy