I’ve had some problems releasing my components using the mvn release:prepare plugin for some time now. Since this used to work before I was convinced that this was project specific and caused by some dependency or plugin conflict. However this was not the case. It turns out that this is a problem with maven 2 and subversion.
I’m using the 2.1.0 version of maven and version 1.5.8, Build 15348 of Subversion. The problem occurs at the end of the release:prepare process when the plugin is to tag subversion. This is the error message that I get is something like this:
[INFO] Unable to tag SCM Provider message: The svn tag command failed. Command output: svn: Commit failed (details follow): svn: File '/CreditCheck/tags/creditcheck-root-2.0/fitnesse/pom.xml' already exists
The work-around for this is really simple. The following two commands will complete the tag of the version to release and update the scm:
- svn up
- mvn release:prepare -Dresume
SCM-406 on jira.codehaus.org contains an extensive discussion about and around this bug.
I used svnkit for my svn client and it solved this bug… I think.