Hi all, I'd like to give you a heads up on the usage of Nexus and some experimentations I've done for the latest ongoing release vote of Studio.
It was the first time that we used Nexus and I have to say that everything went extremely well (except one or two problems due to bugs on some maven plugins). The use of Nexus has really shortened the upload time of artifacts and I was able to finish the "release:perform" goal in 50 minutes, instead of 400 minutes before, when we deployed on people.apache.org. The maven commands we use for releasing stay the same as before "mvn -Prelease mvn:prepare" and then "mvn -Prelease mvn:perform". Only the personal settings.xml file changes. I will update the documentation about it on the wiki today. For the Studio release vote I have tested a "new" approach to releases that is now allowed by the use of Nexus. Instead of only voting a code freeze in a branch (and/or a tag), I was able to add to that two other things: - a link to a repository where actual final artifacts are available for testing (not that useful for Studio releases but it could be very handy for testing the LDAP API for example) - a link to a folder hosted on people.apache.org where actual final distributions (the ones that are going to be pushed on the mirrors) are available for download. I think this is a great improvement in order to determine if the vote should pass or not, as the final jars and distributions can be tested directly. It requires a little more work before launching the vote but less work when the release is approved, only promoting the maven artifacts on Nexux (2 clicks) and moving the distributions uploaded on people.apache.org to the right directories to have them replicated on the mirrors. What do you think about it? Should we generalize this practice on all other Directory releases? Regards, Pierre-Arnaud
