For the first few releases, we've been holding off merging patches to master while the release vote is in progress, partially because of the commits that the maven-release-plugin commits.
I would propose that in the future we continue to merge patches and perform the release tag in a branch (so the release tag itself won't appear in the master timeline) so that development flow is not interrupted. I'm not familiar with what other projects having Java libraries do, so let me know if there's a preferred workflow. Thanks Wes
