After another nightmare by an RM who has not cut a release in a while, I think we need to do something. The documentation on the Commons web pages describes a process that works. I suggest that we standardize on that process, adding some simple automation scripts that RMs can choose to use or not to use for the manual steps and stop fussing with Nexus or the maven release plugin. I cut an RC last night in 25 minutes (about 15 of which were spent waiting for the [pool] tests to complete) and will likely spend about that same amount of time deploying the artifacts to dist/ and what remains of our simple, file-and-directory-based replication infrastructure to get maven artifacts pushed to the maven repos. I do use a simple shell script to manage invoking the maven commands and copying files around to reduce the required time from, say an hour, to 25 minutes. The script is in svn.
I prefer the "manual" approach for the following reasons: 1. I know what it does. Exactly, every time. I know that exactly the binaries that we vote on get deployed to dist/ and exactly the committed tag is used to build everything. The process includes local generation of artifacts that I can inspect and test locally and verify sigs. I know at each step exactly what is being pushed where. 2. I know that it works. Every time. No pom-tweaking, plugin-munging or other half-success management required. 3. It has no commercial / proprietary dependencies. The scripts are optional and are in any case, ASF-licensed, committed to svn. I know others have different opinions on this. It could be we need to support both ways of cutting releases. I would ask, however, that those arguing for the "automagical" approach take a hard look at how many volunteer hours are being spent trying to get maven/nexus to be a release manager and how comparatively little time those of us who take the "manual" approach spend getting our releases built and deployed. While I certainly can't claim to produce perfect artifacts (much less code :), I will also point out that the only major release quality problem that we have had recently was the inadvertent release of a [net] version while fiddling with the release plugin. I don't at all buy the argument that the manual approach is "error-prone" as it allows more and better opportunities for inspection by the RM and community at each stage. Phil --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org
