: The question is whether all those individual archives need to be voted on by
: the Incubator PMC. I think we should make a monolithic release, then build
: unofficial archives ourselves for CPAN, etc, rather than trying to push too
: much through a narrow channel at Apache. Why make things more difficult?
: Releases are hard enough already.
1) Although the lucene release haven't really set a good example of this,
the mantra Juka has always evangalized that i've come to appreciate is
that the "source" release should essentially be "svn export | tar | gzip"
it not only keeps things simple, it ensures that you don't risk
complications of a build process that accidently leaves out important
files (some of hte old lucene-java source release could not actually be
built because common-build.xml was accidently excluded from the tar ball)
2) The source release is all that matters, it's the only thing that *must*
be voted on.
in lucene land we typically (ie: every release i know of) review the
binary release artifacts at the same time as the source vote, because if
there's a problem with them it's probably going ot require a change to the
source release as well -- ut you don't have to do it that way.
Note for example the HTTPD project, which produces all sorts of binary
artifacts from any given source release (in their case not because of
target langauges but because of target *architectures*) they don't even
worry about the binary artifacts until after the source release has been
voted on and made public...
http://httpd.apache.org/dev/release.html
http://httpd.apache.org/dev/binaries.html
i wouldn't jump through any hoops trying to organize the code in some
convoluted way just for the sake of trying to simplify the release voting
-- if you want to to keep the vote simple, make the source release
artificats clean, clear, well documented and easy to "build"
If it makes sense for the Lucy build to have 200 different binary
artifacts targeted at diff languages, so be it - the important thing is
that every one of those binary packages needs to be reproducable by anyone
with the source release, the build documentation, and a copy of the
neccessary dependencies.
And FWIW: I have no direct experience with this sort of thing, but i
suspect stuff like the CPAN and PEAR distributions and what not fall under
the same guidelines as "Downstream Packages" like RPM and DEB files and so
on ... they aren't considered official, and shouldn't factor into the vote
at all. As i understand it: the ASF deliberately avoids
voting/regulating/condoning on the downstream packages...
http://incubator.apache.org/guides/releasemanagement.html#best-practice-downstream
The Lucy PPMC (in conjunction with the IPMC) should be able to formally
vote on a Lucy source release, and after that: any individual (including
PMC members) can go build and upload artifacts to CPAN, PEAR, etc... (no
vote required)
-Hoss
