Maven release plugin ignores releaseVersion attribute

Question

I'm trying to create a svn branch from the trunk which has the version of TRUNK-SNAPSHOT in its pom and children's pom files with this command:

mvn --batch-mode release:branch -DbranchName=15.1 -DupdateBranchVersions=true -DupdateWorkingCopyVersions=false -DreleaseVersion=15.1

However I'm getting this error:
[ERROR] BUILD ERROR
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Error parsing version, cannot determine next version: Unable to parse the version string: "TRUNK-SNAPSHOT"

While it's obvious that it was not able to calculate the next version of TRUNK-SNAPSHOT, why would the plugin ignore the releaseVersion argument that I wanted it to use for the new branch instead of trying to calculate the next version from the trunk's version identifier?

Although running in interactive mode allows me to provide the version for the new branch, I'll need it work in the batch mode. Is there any other way I can specify the new branch version in the batch mode regardless of what the branching source (trunk) version is?

Update 1: The plugin version I use is 2.0-beta-8

Answer 1

This was fixed in 2.4 as part of https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MRELEASE-511