Poms are written with wrong encodings

It is even worse. Even if the POM contains a valid xml declaration with utf-8 as encoding, the plugin writes an invalid XML file! Just add a developer with a name containing a German umlaut like 'ü' or any other character expressed with an entity (here the EURO symbol):

<name>ö &xf6; €</name>

the saved pom.xml contains after preparation

<name>ö ö *</name>

where '*' is the replacement character for a non-displayable character.

JIRA did some own interpretation of the last comment, so the name of the developer contained originally:

<name>&ouml; &#xf6; &#x20AC;</name>

I wrote a test, testWritePom in PrepareReleaseMojoTest
i have commented it because it succeeds under win and fails on linux continuum and

and don't have time to test right now

Here is a patch to use WriterFactory and XmlStreamWriter added in plexus-utils 1.4.5 to handle stream encoding detection according to the XML content written.

see http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVENUSER/XML+encoding for the roadmap to XML encoding support in Maven2

can't currently apply as plexus-maven-plugin is not yet released.

This will likely also require bumping the prerequisites up to maven 2.0.7 to support using a new version of plexus-utils. Applier will need to verify this is the case and adjust if necessary.

ok, reworked the patch: the unreleased dependency was a typo (how could I let it into the patch?...)
but one problem persists when running testcases that I cannot find how to fix:
org.codehaus.plexus.component.repository.exception.ComponentLookupException: Component descriptor cannot be found in the component repository: org.apache.maven.artifact.metadata.ArtifactMetadataSource [default] (lookup realm: ClassRealm[plexus.core, parent: null]).

it contains a little fix for a problem committed this morning in r567988 for MRELEASE-124: String.contains API is only available in Java 5+, it is not in Java 1.4

we need to push a release of beta-7 to do a release of 2.0.8. Bumping to next release

everything should be fixed in r591123
but I didn't find your test (testWritePom in PrepareReleaseMojoTest) to check it

I think I'll write 2 sets of POM files:

• src/test/resources/rewrite-for-development/basic-pom-with-encoding
• src/test/resources/rewrite-for-release/basic-pom-with-encoding
  like basic-pom ones, but with poms in UTF-16: I guarantee it will fail if encoding isn't properly handled somewhere

but I need some time to understand the coding part of the tests

any idea on other useful tests?