We are pleased to announce the Maven Release Plugin 1.5-SNAPSHOT release! 

http://maven.apache.org/maven-1.x/plugins/release/

Produce project release 

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Changes in this version include:

  Fixed bugs:

o The encoding of the project.xml file is not preserved after doing 
  release:transform. Fixes MPRELEASE-12. Thanks to Dennis Lundberg. 
o handle non-jar dependencies Fixes MPRELEASE-11. 
o Handle poms with a namespace Fixes MPSCM-64. 

  Changes:

o Replace the deprecated xmlParserAPIs by xml-apis 1.3.03. Fixes MAVEN-1753. 
o Update dependencies to match ones in maven 1.1 core and to unify them 
  between plugins. The following dependencies are updated : maven v1.0-rc2 
  -> v1.0.2 dom4j v1.4-dev-8 -> v1.4 commons-jelly v1.0-beta-4 -> 
  v1.0 Fixes MAVEN-1712.  

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To automatically install the plugin, type the following on a single line:

maven plugin:download
  -Dmaven.repo.remote=http://www.ibiblio.org/maven,http://people.apache.org/repo/m1-snapshot-repository/
  -DgroupId=maven
  -DartifactId=maven-release-plugin
  -Dversion=1.5-SNAPSHOT

For a manual installation, you can download the plugin here:
http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/java-repository/maven/plugins/maven-release-plugin-1.5-SNAPSHOT.jar
 

Have fun!
-The Maven Release Plugin development team