for the curious (and whoever has to do it next), this is our current release process
http://slider.incubator.apache.org/developing/releasing.html it's essentially a mix of: property-driven and targets and manual steps between them. Ant can do things like invoke maven, play with git and svn, validate URLs and generate the various emails. Humans have to do the dull bits in between: posting the emails, collecting the results, pressing buttons on JIRA, Nexus and Apache CMS. The final actions to build the incubator vote result, commit the RC to a release and issue the announcement still need to be tested/debugged/fixed —once done I think we have the release process pretty much locked down to the extent that a new RC can be cut in under an hour, with the other steps adding up to ~3 hours work spread over the days needed for votes to complete. Which means....we can think about a release process of 6-8 weeks. I'd almost say "monthly" were it not for the double vote overhead; there'd only effectively be 2 weeks between the public release of one version and the starting of a vote on the next. 6 weeks would allow time for bugs to surface -steve
