I have now had to sink two 2.4.1 RCs because of errors in the change log. I made a pass over git history and ensured every commit was included. I had also made a pass over JIRA to move out any unresolved issues or complete the resolution of same. What I did not do is check that every resolved JIRA corresponded to an actual commit. This is not something RMs have had to do in the past and it asks a lot of them.
I know NOW that as RM I cannot currently trust committers to get fix versions right or care about this. That's right... Commtters cannot be trusted to correctly maintain issue metadata in JIRA. That is not a good situation for the project to be in. Up until now it has not been the responsibility of the RM to check each and every JIRA status. It has been the collective responsibility of committers to care about the project's release tracking insofar as to correctly update fix versions in JIRA. For releases containing relatively few changes, like 2.4.1, with ~50 changes, I suppose it is possible for the RM to remove all 2.4.1 fix versions, walk the commit history, and set back fix versions on JIRA to actually correspond with what was truly committed. However, for minor releases, with hundreds of commits, this will not be possible. I think the root cause is GitHub and JIRA are two separate change tracking systems with only a minimal amount of integration. It requires manual effort. More and more, new committers are familiar with GitHub and PRs and are not familiar with JIRA and the Apache way of using JIRA to build change logs. We need to better educate new and existing committers on their responsibilities with regards to maintaining JIRA metadata correctly. -- Best regards, Andrew Words like orphans lost among the crosstalk, meaning torn from truth's decrepit hands - A23, Crosstalk
