Some of you may be aware that the Maven team (actually Sonatype) has installed Nexus repository manager onto a zone at http://repository.apache.org. Thus, projects are now being given the option to use the Nexus repository instead of the stuff on people.apache.org for things like snapshots and/or releases.
One main advantage is that it uses HTTPs for deploys. No futzing with ssh/scp to get deploys working. You need to put a setting or two in your settings.xml file for auth info, but that's it. The deploys will just work. From a release perspective, it also supports easy staging and promotion. When a release is deployed, it goes into a staging area automatically. We then call the vote and if the vote passes, it's a push button promotion to deploy it to central. Nexus handles all the metadata and such. You don't need the maven-stage-plugin anymore. Now for the downsides: 1) The https self signed cert they currently use requires some work to embed it into your jre keystore. They've asked for a real cert, but haven't gotten it yet. 2) Requires a little user management to put all of use into the "cxf" group (if only Apache had ldap....), but Sonatype and the Maven PMC is willing to manage that. 3) User impact: if we decide that snapshots should go to nexus (we could just do releases), users that use the snapshots would need to change their URL's to grab from the new URL. The links on our wiki would need to change as well. 4) Obviously, our release procedures wiki page would need major updating. 5) Learning curve: something new. You can see the maven release docs: http://maven.apache.org/developers/release/releasing.html for a kind of walkthrough of how it would work. (with screen shots!) Anyway, I'd like to hear others thoughts. It MOSTLY applies to myself and Willem as we're the only ones that have done releases. However, the snapshot stuff applies to Benson and a couple others as well. -- Daniel Kulp dk...@apache.org http://www.dankulp.com/blog
