Proper Post-Release Cleanup of Maven SNAPSHOTS with -alpha/-beta/-rc qualifiers

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We are running NXRM3 and are currently trying to set up various clean-up routines. This question is about our Maven setup:

We have a maven group repo that combines a maven-snapshot and a maven-release hosted repo.

We are now setting up the “Maven - Delete SNAPSHOT” task, since according the documentation it has functionality that is not yet fully subsumed by the clean-up policy mechanisms.

We understand how the SNAPSHOT count and age parameters work in combination and everything here works as expected … the problem comes with the “Remove SNAPSHOTS when a corresponding release is found” option.

Our starting situation was the following:

  1. the snapshot repo contained the following two
  • 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT
  • 1.0.0a1-SNAPSHOT
  1. the relase repo contained the following
  • 1.0.0

After running the cleanup task, 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT was purged as expected, but 1.0.0a1-SNAPSHOT was not removed.

My Questions are thus:

  1. Is the observed behaviour expected, or should the 1.0.0a1-SNAPSHOT also be purged by the task
  2. If the behaviour is working as intended (because the task considers 1.0.0 and 1.0.0a1 to be different versions), what is the best way to automatically get rid of the 1.0.0a1-SNAPSHOT when 1.0.0 is released?