If you want more control over the release phase, the maven-release-plugin (mrp) will not help you much.
In that case I have modified versions-maven-plugin to be able to increment version and also to add / remove SNAPSHOT suffix.
Thanks to these new features you are able to write script that do the same thing as mrp, but you have full control over each step.
For example, mrp commits changed version before it actually tries to build it. If the build fails, you have to revert that commit or, in case of SVN, you have to do another revert-commit.
Note: I am not the original author of the increment function. I have adopted it
from autoincrement-versions-maven-plugin, as stated on github page.
