The Maven team is pleased to announce the release of the Apache Parent POM, version 7. This POM provides a base configuration for ASF projects build with Apache Maven [0]. Besides some updated plugin versions, the most interesting change in this version of the POM is the inclusion of a configuration for the Maven Assembly Plugin to produce ASF-compliant source distributions. Please see [1] for a detailed diff to the previous version. In more detail, the Assembly Plugin configuration for the source distribution is part of the profile "apache-release" that was already introduced in version 6 of the parent POM. This configuration creates a ZIP archive containing the project's sources at the root module of the release process. Projects with different needs regarding the source distribution and/or release process have the following options: a) Create a custom assembly descriptor (see [2]) for the source distribution and set the POM property "sourceReleaseAssemblyDescriptor" to its name. b) Disable the predefined execution "source-release-assembly" of the Assembly Plugin via the following POM snippet: maven-assembly-plugin 2.2-beta-5 source-release-assembly true c) Configure the Maven Release Plugin to use another release profile than the predefined "apache-release" via something like this: maven-release-plugin 2.0-beta-9 -Pcustom-release org.apache apache 7 Enjoy, -The Maven team [0] [1] [2]