Greets, I believe that the release guide wiki page that Peter started at <http://wiki.apache.org/lucy/ReleaseGuide> is now feature-complete and ready for either review or use.
This draft is more of a mechanical, step-by-step recipe than I have seen in the release guides for some other Apache projects. Discussions of principle, such as you find at <http://incubator.apache.org/guides/releasemanagement.html> have been streamlined away. For instance, although the Incubator release documentation treats the LICENSE and NOTICE files at length, there is no mention of them on our wiki page -- because performing QC on those files is not the RM's direct responsibility. It is first, the responsibility of individual committers to update them as necessary with each individual commit; second, the PPMC's responsibility to oversee development and ensure that they are kept up-to-date on an ongoing basis; and finally, a PPMC member responsibility to check them before casting a +1 vote for the release. The RM has enough to do already. Additionally, only the steps that must be performed every time are spelled out in detail; for one-time activities such as PGP key setup, the reader is referred elsewhere. The idea is that first-time release managers must familiarize themselves with the issues involved by consulting expansive Apache documentation, but once that preparation has been completed and the RM is up-to-speed, our release guide serves as a succinct enumeration of the actions required to perform a release -- hopefully just as useful on the third or fourth go-round as on the first. The guide currently refers to certain resources that do not yet exist: trunk/devel/bin/update_version http://www.apache.org/dist/incubator/lucy/KEYS http://www.apache.org/dist/incubator/lucy/ http://archive.apache.org/dist/incubator/lucy/ download links from the Lucy website We should work to produce all of these except possibly the archival folder before starting the release process. Marvin Humphrey
