I have been poking around at the release stuff for a few days and feel I have an understanding of the necessary steps to get a release out. Unfortunately, there seem to be loads of items on the check list. In order to keep myself sane, I have divided them into three areas: schedule, mechanics and certification... a description of each follows. I greatly appreciate any comments and questions.
Thanks, -dain Schedule Based on the feedback from the poll, we are going to feature-box our releases. This means we need come to an agreement on what is in the 1.2 release. I will start another email thread to discuss the 1.2 feature set and priorities. Once we know the required feature set we will be able to track the progress of the release based on the completed features. Mechanics The maven configuration, shell scripts, review process and voting procedure for a release are all quite complex and can have a big impact on the release. I think this area will benefit greatly from practicing and iterative improvement. I'd like to start by posting a binary each Wednesday to http://people.apache.org/dist/geronimo/unstable/ and every week add at least one improvement to the process. Starting with tomorrow here is what I'd like to improve for the next few weeklies: 9/20 - Simply get the first binary posted with a change log swizzled from JIRA 9/27 - Add a script or maven config to change the version number of G to 1.2-${svn rev} 10/4 - Practice the review and voting process by pushing a voted upon monthly snapshot (just an idea) Hopefully, I'll be able to con a few of you in to help tune some parts of the release process. If you have some free cycles, and want to help with build/release stuff, please jump in and help. Certification This has always been a big chore for us and the amount of time we spend on it seems to be exponentially proportional to the length of time that has passed since our last certification. In the case of 1.2, I fear we are going to have to spend a lot of time on this. In the future, I'd like to move us to a continuous TCK testing mode where we get a report every morning indicating whether or not the previous day's commits broke anything. For now, I'd love to have our weekly binaries tested and get results within a few days.
