Configuration of policy for calculating next (release) version

Currently, when preparing the release, the version to release is always the next version which usually is the current version without the snapshot extension.
There are quite a lot of projects (Apache Felix, Sling and others) following an even release numbering policy. So while the current development version is odd (like 1.2.3-SNAPSHOT), the next released version will be 1.2.4.
It would be nice if this could be made configuration through some configuration property like
<versionPolicy>next-even</versionPolicy> (with possible values being: next (default, as-is), next-even, next-odd

I briefly scanned through the code and it seems that adding support for this requires changes in both, the release-manager and the release-plugin.

If this feature gets accepted and if someone could give me some minor hints how/where to add this I could come up with a patch.