There is a problem with the maven-release-plugin when used with recent versions of Subversion. It stared at version 1.5.1 of Subversion and made the release:prepare command fail because Maven was no longer able to tag the release.

You may have encountered the following error with release:prepare:

svn: File '...' already exists

One reason for this can be SCM-406.

For some time I've worked around this issue by doing my releases on a machine with an older version of Subversion.

A better solution is to use the latest version of the maven-release-plugin (2.0-beta-9 at the moment) and set the remoteTagging property to true:

<build>
  <plugins>
    <plugin>      
      <artifactId>maven-release-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>2.0-beta-9</version>
      <configuration>     
        <remoteTagging>true</remoteTagging>
        <preparationGoals>clean install</preparationGoals>
        <autoVersionSubmodules>true</autoVersionSubmodules>
        <tagBase>...</tagBase>
      </configuration>
    </plugin>     
  </plugins>
</build>

Keep in mind that you should always specify the exact version of the plugins you are using. This not only makes sure you get what you need it also ensures that the build is reproducible in the future and works consistently accross different machines.

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Posted by Stefan Reuter on May 30, 2009 3:58:00 PM CEST #