[MRELEASE-850] mvn release:prepare reformats pom.xml comments

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Auto Closed
• Affects Version/s: 2.4.1
• Environment: openSUSE 12.3 (x86-64)
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Tristan Miller
• Created: 14/Oct/13 05:19
• Updated: 16/Mar/18 22:40
• Resolved: 16/Mar/18 22:40

Description

We have a Maven project that contains licence headers as XML comments in the pom.xml files. We use a licence checker plugin which checks for the presence of these licence headers.

It seems the mvn release:prepare command subtly reformats the XML comments. The licence checker runs after this reformatting, and fails since the licence header is no longer an exact match to the reference text. The problem occurs with the following comment lines:

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Maven inserts some extra whitespace:

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses />.

I suspect this is a bug in Maven (or whatever XML parser it relies on). Maven should not reformat XML comments (and especially not in a URL where whitespace is significant).

Issue Links

• is related to: MRELEASE-601 The Maven 2 release plugin modifies CDATA elements in pom.xml files.
• is related to: MRELEASE-266 Content outside root elements in pom are not transfered to the release poms
• is related to: MRELEASE-607 release:prepare messes up line wrapping in pom.xml
• is related to: MRELEASE-676 prepare goal corrupts pom.xml file by removing some line breaks in CDATA