Snapshot artifact promotion

I'm not sure if this has already been taken into account, but this is something we would like to achieve using Apache Archiva:

• a snapshot build is published to the snapshot repository;
• the snapshot passes the integration and QA testing;
• the delivery team qualifies the current SNAPSHOT as a release candidate and triggers a copy of the artifact to a staging repository (promotion to staging);
• after further testing in a production-like environment, the artifact is promoted to the release repository.

Apparently, there is no imperative functionality implemented for promoting an artifact. There is though a functionality that mirrors a snapshot repository into a staging, but that pulls all the snapshots into the staging repository, or at least this is my understanding. However, we would like to manually (API calls) add only particular snapshots to a staging repository.

The rest call to copy the artifact to a staging repository fails due to the artifact is classified as a snapshot.

A workaround is to drop the snapshot restriction on the snapshot repository and remove the SNAPSHOT suffix from the version.