On Wed, Feb 09, 2022 at 07:23:55AM -0500, Mark Phippard wrote: > 2. We need a RM to produce the release. Only a handful of people have > done this and I am not one of them so I cannot comment on how hard > this is. It does feel like this entire process could be completely > automated though. As in, someone creates a tag or pushes a button in > Jenkins and the rest just happens.
I think our main problem is that not enough people have gone through this process, and it may seem more intimidating than it should be. It is not actually a lot of work. The process is well documented and already automated for the most part. The RM mostly runs release.py in a series of steps, by following our docs. Anyone on the PMC can do this. If you've made a commit to the project or to the website, have reviewed fixes in STATUS and have communicated with people in this project via mailing list and IRC, then you already know everything you need to know to become the RM! The main burden is to guess a future date for the release and then keep track of our progress until the release is done. The RM should ensure we don't miss the prospected date by a large margin. This requires constant attention to the project for a while. If you cannot afford to spend roughly half an hour per day on it for a week or two, you don't have enough time. During this time, the RM mostly keeps track of things in STATUS and keeps poking people to help with reviewing, testing, and signing. The actual releasing is done by doing a few SVN commits, again via release.py. And the RM writes release announcements, which is also automated by release.py. There is a one-time effort to ensure that sending mail via your apache.org account works; the ASF has an SMTP relay you can use for this purpose and this needs to be configured in your mail client. And you need a Linux system, which as we know is a show-stopper for some of our developers. Anyone who wants to RM on Windows would need to port the release.py process over first, which is probably a good chunk of work. I would recommend setting up a Linux VM instead.
