On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 7:14 AM, David Bosschaert <david.bosscha...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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!
Some projects use the maven-changes-plugin to read the data from JIRA and incorporate it automatically. > * 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? The source-release.zip file must be in dist by Foundation policy. > * 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... See above. The board decided that 'the official releases' have to come from the dist area where only PMC members have access to put them. Whether we could set up some scripting or automation to make that easier ... > * Step 10 - this info is available in JIRA, it should not be necessary > to describe the component release again... The reporter is part of the board's tracking of the project. We could write a maven plugin to poke it REST-fully, I guess. > > 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
