title: Using maven-release-plugin in Eclipse
body: <p>I recently tried to use <code>maven-release-plugin</code> since it is apparently the recommended way of building and packages releases in the Maven universe. </p>
  
  <p>However I wanted to use this within Eclipse, as the rest of my development workflow is Eclipse based. I normally run Maven commands via the m2eclipse plugin provided as part of Eclipse Juno (4.2)</p>
  
  <p>I noticed a few oddities when I tried to run "release:prepare" within Eclipse:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Some extra files were created in the root project directory - "pom.xml.releaseBackup" and "release.properties". Do they really belong there? Have I got the release directories set up correctly? I wouldn't really consider these temporary artifacts as part of my source code tree......</li>
  <li>The <code>pom.xml</code> gets manually overwritten with the updated release number. Eclipse warns you and is happy to reload the updated version - but is this generally safe?</li>
  <li>The prepare ultimately fails giving the error <code>[ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-release-plugin:2.0:prepare (default-cli) on project clisk: Failed to invoke Maven build. Error configuring command-line. Reason: Maven executable not found at: C:\Users\Mike\git\clisk\EMBEDDED\bin\mvn.bat -&gt; [Help 1]</code> - presumably because I am using the built-in Maven excetable provided by m2eclipse rather than the command line. I guess I could install command line maven as well.... but is that sensible or will it just cause more problems?</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Given these kind of issues, Is there a way to get maven-release-plugin to work smoothly within Eclipse, or should I just give up and continue to do releases manually?</p>