> On Sep 17, 2021, at 9:39 AM, Jenkins, Rodney J (Rod) 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> David,
> 
> <<<
>    I think it's more that we're all using different commands/scripts to 
> create those files and getting slightly different output.
>>>> 
> 
> Are we open to using some automation?  It would seem to me that there is 
> plenty of tools we could leverage to automate the release.  I have not been 
> around here all that long as compared to many of you, so this was probably 
> discussed before.  I am open to working on that, if we are interested.

The primary trick to that is Apache does not have any concept of shared 
credentials or users.  Everything has to be executed as a committer using their 
personal credentials.  So that basically means we can't do releases from say a 
shared build box like a Jenkins or Buildbot install hosted at Apache or 
anywhere.

In our early days I put a lot of work into creating tooling we can all use to 
hopefully make the task of releasing easier / less time consuming.  It would 
use the credentials on your machine to move the binaries from Nexus into the 
Apache staging area (which is svn), generate release notes, update the download 
page, start the vote thread, etc.

I likely went overboard or it wasn't really user-friendly or documented enough 
as when I stopped doing releases, those tools stopped getting used and 
everything was done manually, we lost things like release notes and the 
documentation stopped getting used and updated.  These days people figure it 
out for themselves as there is no up-to-date documentation to help them.

If we could get back to a place where we are sharing the scripts & commands we 
use to do releases and documenting the process, that'd be really great.

The trick is there is there's so much technical debt piled up in the docs/tools 
that it's really too much to tackle while doing a release.


-David

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