Cannot release Vaadin project

I cannot perform a release on an out-of-the-box Vaadin 7.6.6 project.

Here's what I do:

1. Create a standard Vaadin project using the vaadin-archetype-application-multimodule Maven archetype.
2. Add <scm> section to the project's parent POM. (required for Maven release) and added <distributionManagement> section (requried for Maven deploy)
3. On the parent: mvn clean build   (just to make Maven download appropriate stuff and see if the build actually works)
4. On the parent: mvn clean
5. On the parent: mvn -Pproduction release:prepare  (this passes without problems)
6. On the parent: mvn -Pproduction release:perform

The latter step fails with

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-deploy-plugin:2.7:deploy (default-deploy)
on project myvaadintest-production:
The packaging for this project did not assign a file to the build artifact -> [Help 1]

Ok, so the -production module doesn't actually produce a build artifact .. or at least not when executed with the production profile. But that's the whole point: When doing releases you would want the production profile to be active, wouldn't you?

This is all purely out-of-the-box.

Shouldn't the ambition be that this would work out-of-the-box ?   (or am I the only creature in the world to be performing proper releases with Maven and Vaadin?)

Peter

I believe I've solved it. The archetype cannot be blamed.  :-)

It is a consequence of how the Maven Release Plugin works: Command line arguments (like -Pproduction) on the parent doesn't get propagated when the Release Plugin executes mvn sub-tasks on sub-modules. The fix for that is the arguments property which can (and should) be used both on release:prepare and release:perform.

In other words step 5 and 6 above becomes

5. On the parent: mvn -Pproduction -Darguments="-Pproduction" release:prepare 
6. On the parent: mvn -Pproduction -Darguments="-Pproduction" release:perform

I'm guessing the -Pproduction on its own is now redundant but I've kept as I do not know if it actually has an effect or not.
Enjoy.
This is perhaps worthy of its own blog post.