How to set versions in a non-standard maven reactor build?

Question

For reasons beyond my control, we have to use a maven project setup where the topmost pom.xml is not actually the parent pom. Now we would like to create a jenkins deployment pipeline, which of course would deploy a unique version of the entire reactor to our nexus repository.

Our setup is like this:

root (no parent pom)
 +---- parent  (company-wide parent pom is somewhere else)
 +---- module1 (parent pom is ../parent/pom.xml)
 +---- module2 (parent pom is ../parent/pom.xml)

Now we have to:

• set the versions of root, parent, module1 and module2 to our unique build version
• set the parent versions of module1 and module2 to the same build version
• leave the version of the external parent pom intact

I see no parameters in the versions:set mojo that do this. Calling mvn versions:set -DnewVersion=1.2.3 sets the version for the root pom only. The exact same call works perfectly in a traditional parent / child reactor build.

Is there any possible solution?

Note: versions:update-child-modules is not an option, since we can't define a specific target version

Answer 1

This has been discussed on the mailing list and reported (MVERSIONS-131) with the conclusion that this would best be handled through implementing support for wildcards:

mvn versions:set -DgroupId='*' -DartifactId='*' -DoldVersion='*' -DnewVersion=1.2-SNAPSHOT

This improvement is reported as MVERSIONS-228; it doesn't appear to be implemented in the current (2.1) release of versions-maven-plugin.