Maven Release Plugin not updating SNAPSHOTs in dependencyManagement

Question

I have a company-wide parent pom with a <dependencyManagement> section which defines the versions of my projects that should be used throughout my application, some of which are SNAPSHOTs, a bit like this:

<dependencyManagement>
  <dependencies>
    ...
    <dependency>
      <groupId>my.group</groupId>
      <artifactId>myArtifact</artifactId>
      <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    </dependency>
    ...
  <dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

When I run release:prepare on the parent pom, these SNAPSHOTs are not removed. The result is that the projects which inherit from the parent cannot use its versions when being released themselves. How do I ensure that the <dependencyManagement> section of the parent pom is updated when I release?

I saw this question: why does maven release plugin allow for SNAPSHOT version in dependency managment?, but the tickets mentioned claim to be fixed in earlier versions of the plugin.

Maven Release Plugin 2.3.1
Apache Maven 3.0.4 (r1232337; 2012-01-17 08:44:56+0000)
Java version: 1.6.0_31, vendor: Sun Microsystems Inc.
OS name: "windows 7", version: "6.1", arch: "amd64", family: "windows"

Answer 1

The maven-release-plugin is only concerned with checking whether you have SNAPSHOT-s in your <dependencies/> section. The <dependencies/> will be inherited by all modules which extend this parent. They will always try to resolve these dependencies before building.

The difference between the <dependencies/> and <dependencyManagement/> sections is that the latter only defines versions which will be used. This said, the release plugin is not at all concerned if you have defined SNAPSHOT-s there, unless this parent project is an aggregator or part of an aggregator and this parent is being released as a whole with the aggregator.

Similarly, the maven-release-plugin does not take care of <pluginManagement/>. Also, I believe it only addresses Maven properties containing artifact versions only when these are relating to <dependencies/>.

The worse part is -- as far as I recall -- you will not even get warned if a dependency/plugin has a SNAPSHOT version, if it's in a <*Management/> section.

For this reason, the approach I have resorted to is to have a parent POM with <properties/> containing the versions of the artifacts. Before releasing it, I scan it for SNAPSHOT-s using grep:

grep SNAPSHOT pom.xml