Hi all, Recent vote of the release didn't go too well because of variying opinions on where the release candidate artifacts should be provided. With this discussion I want to get an impression of what people need when they review a release, and what this means for the requirements and wishes of the actual release artifact location.
It seems the norm in Apache projects is that artifacts are manually uploaded by the Release Engineer to somewhere in his personal people.apache.org web space. So some people prefer this approach. The upside here is that the release engineer can arrange the location so that it is as humanly consumable as possible. (Proponents of this approach may add more upsides that I may not know about.) However, we're using Maven for the release packaging, signing and verification, and uploading to a Maven staging repository on repository.apache.org. This means that we can automize the upload completely by the existing Maven release process. The location that the Release Engineer would publish would ultimately be a small Maven repository. This has the advantage that if you want to review a release candidate from the perspective of an existing project that is depending on MetaModel, you could simply consume the repository in your project and update your dependency version number. That way you could use the release candidate with very few changes and be able to build, test and run other projects that depend on it. It also means that the location of the release candidate artifacts is not on people.apache.org, and that for instance the source zip file will not be in the root of the upload location, but in: [root]/org/apache/metamodel/MetaModel/[version]/MetaModel-[version]-source-release.zip. That location is obviously less easily accessible if you just get the repository URL. My opinion: I like the automatic Maven repository and don't see the point (yet?) in why it has to be on people.apache.org. That said, I do think the vote email should contain not just one link to the repository, but also a link specifically to the source zip. That way the complication of finding the source zip is overcome for people less accustomed to Maven's repository layout. Best regards, Kasper
