Hi all,

Every time I do a release in the Felix community I am thinking:
there's too many manual steps involved here, some of which seem to be
unnecessary as they seem duplicative. I'm wondering whether all these
steps are necessary? Especially since other Apache communities are not
performing all of them...

Here's what I always do (I hope I didn't forget anything...)

Preparing the release:
1. Some components have a changelog.txt that needs to be updated. This
information generally is directly copied&pasted from JIRA.
2. Release is prepared, tagged and staged in Apache Nexus.
3. Release vote email is sent out.

After the vote has succeeded:
4. Vote conclusion email is sent out
5. Release is published in Maven Nexus
6. Release artifacts are copied into dist SVN
7. Jira is updated, component version marked as released
8. Website News section is updated
9. Website Download section is updated (I still find this very awkward
to do as I still haven't found out how to do this from the CMS browser
editor)
10. Release is registered at https://reporter.apache.org/addrelease.html?felix

While some steps are obviously required some of them don't seem to add
a lot of value.
* Step 1 - changelog.txt. This info is direcly from JIRA, so whats the
extra value? People can just look it up in JIRA!
* Step 6 - the artifacts are already in Apache Maven
(https://repository.apache.org/content/repositories/releases/org/apache/felix/),
so why do they need to be copied to another location (dist) too?
* Step 8 - while it seems useful to have some sort of a news section
on the website, the current one simply lists released versions without
any interesting details so I don't think it provides any value to
users.
* Step 9 - the downloads page can be made to point to the Maven Repo
which will mean that it does not need to be manually updated any
more...
* Step 10 - this info is available in JIRA, it should not be necessary
to describe the component release again...

Not sure what others think and maybe some of these steps are required
from an ASF point of view, but in my opinion it would be nice if we
could get rid of the manual and duplicative tasks as much as
possible...

Cheers,

David

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