Major Description
Updating versions is useful; sometimes you just want to change the version numbers in your POMs without checking in right away. There should be a way to do that. It could either be a new goal (release:update-versions) or simply an option on release:prepare to avoid tagging.
Why would you want this?
... because you need to use svnmerge.py http://www.orcaware.com/svn/wiki/Svnmerge.py
... because you're using an unsupported SCM MRELEASE-184
... because you need to take other manual steps before tagging (updating other metadata files)
... because you need to make a branch instead of making a tag MRELEASE-203
... because you're skipping version numbers (I was calling this 1.1-SNAPSHOT, but now I want to call it 2.0-SNAPSHOT)
... because you don't want to tag until after you've blessed the release (in the Maven release process, if the vote fails, you have to delete the tag)
... because you want to update your version number to contain special build-based metadata every time you build