I would think that it would be it's own plugin. The release plugin would work when I've done working on my branch, but I don't have a way to set up the branch build. This is even harder in a multi-project environment where some of the sub projects will be branched and some will not. We can do this by hand a few times and get some use cases.
We are slowly moving our build to be more mavenized and more componentized as we have several dev teams sharing components. Thanks.
