Write And Configure Your Own Release Profile

In order to prepare for Maven 4, each project will instead require to define their own release profile that they'll be able to customise to match their needs:

• for internal projects, just configure the maven-source-plugin for example
• for projects published to Maven Central repository, you'll need to add also maven-javadoc-plugin and maven-gpg-plugin: see the documentation.
  Notice: if you already published to Maven Central, there is a good chance the configuration has already been done in a parent POM.

Then configure maven-release-plugin to use that profile during release:perform with releaseProfiles parameter:

<project>
  [...]
  <build>
    [...]
    <plugins>
      [...]
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-release-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>3.1.0</version>
        <configuration>
          <releaseProfiles>my-project-release</releaseProfiles>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
      [...]
    </plugins>
    [...]
  </build>

  [...]

  <profiles>
    <profile>
      <id>my-project-release</id>
      <build>
        <plugins>
         [...
          put here your release-specific plugins invocations, like maven-source-plugin, maven-javadoc-plugin, maven-gpg-plugin, ...
          ...]
        </plugins>
      </build>
    </profile>
    [...]
  </profiles>
</project>

Short Term: Force Using Maven 3-only Default Release Profile

Configuring explicitely useReleaseProfile parameter to true will force Maven Release Plugin 3 to work like version 2.

It provides an easy but temporary solution, working only with Maven 3, when you can't yet write your own release profile.