release:update-versions should support -DreleaseVersion too (not only -DdevelopmentVersion), so it also supports not suffixing the version with -SNAPSHOT

I patched this, please pull my changes:
https://github.com/apache/maven-release/pull/2

This fix also fixes the fact that RewritePomVersionsPhase.getOriginalVersionMap() was inaccurate (although that did not seem to have any bad effect).

Would you mind attaching it as a patch to JIRA? We can't use the github feature directly. Thanks!

No problem I did:
git format-patch 124470185de7f3218380f2d7c0a384495ebb9955
and attached that file.

That's probably a git patch, not an old-school patch. If you want an old-school patch, please inform me how I can create that from a command line or intelliJ after the changes have already been committed.

The more interesting question is: Why do you want to do this? IMHO this functionality was not implemented on purpose, because you should never have locally a non-SNAPSHOT version.

I can't use the release:prepare goal for various reasons [1],
but when I am releasing, I do need to be able to change all my versions from SNAPSHOT to release, tag and deploy and then from release to SNAPSHOT again.

[1] Here's why I can't use the release:prepare goal:

• Our project has several git repositories with SNAPSHOT dependencies between them: https://github.com/droolsjbpm (guvnor depends on drools, drools depends on droolsjbpm-knowledge, ...). Having them all in a single git repo (of 1.2 GB) was unworkable for many reasons, yet for the time being they do continue to share the same release lifecycle.
• We use tycho for our eclipse plugin (see droolsjbpm-tools). The release plugin and tycho don't integrate as far as I know.

So I am creating release scripts here (to avoid having to manually change versions, tag, etc on every single release):
https://github.com/droolsjbpm/droolsjbpm-build-bootstrap/tree/master/script/release
and these require this patch.

There's several things here:

• I'm not quite sure of the motivation for update-versions in the first place - maybe we should recommend the versions plugin instead

• regardless of the above, we need to document the differences, and fix the misleading statement (or apply this patch)

• we still need to look at the one line change that appears to be correct but doesn't reference a specific fix

There is an alternative plugin to change the versions:
http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-release-plugin/update-versions-mojo.html

The release plugin goal "update-versions" should probably be deprecated in favor of that plugin.
http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-release-plugin/update-versions-mojo.html

@Geoffrey: Is this the one you wanted to link to?

http://mojo.codehaus.org/versions-maven-plugin/

mvn versions:set -DnewVersion=2.0.0

@Tomislav: yes

This is also true for the branch goal. Specifying a -DreleaseVersion=1.0 the release plugin generate as release version 1.0-SNAPSHOT. But when the plugin ask for the branch version, the created branch pom will be correct.