Control versioning in new maven-release-plugin

I have been waiting with much anticipation for the new version of the maven-release-plugin to be, well released. Our team uses this time saving plugin heavily but since moving to a MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH version strategy we quickly found out that it needed some new features. What we really needed was the ability to specify versions for the tag and for the new trunk. For example, when HEAD is at 2.1.0-SNAPSHOT, while in batch-mode the new default version would be 2.1.1-SNAPSHOT, but I want it to be 2.2.0-SNAPSHOT.

Fortunately, someone else was thinking the same thing and the new capabilities where already in the works. Our current version we are using is 2.0-beta-7. But I noticed today the maven team finally released 2.0-beta-8 (see repo1). Here are the release notes for the new version.

What I was specifically interested in was the new batch-mode features. Now instead of having to manually update the POMs after creating a release I can do the following automatically in CI:

mvn release:prepare -DdevelopmentVersion=2.2.0-SNAPSHOT

I haven't tested it yet, but will know in the near future if it works.