A modest suggestion about testing versus release votes

[Benson Margulies]

Might I suggest some sort of informal testing process *before* you
call a vote? Go ahead, if you like, and stage XXX-RC-1 to nexus, but
don't call a vote. Get people to test it and find problems like broken
links and missing notices. When it all looks clean, just drop the
staged repo, and run the release with the actual release version. Then
your votes can look like 95% of all the other votes at apache; a
pretty rapid verification process.