Brian, I hope the release process can be refined to allow substantial usage of the RC builds by syncing with the central repo. Since Apache requires a "release" to have binding votes, you could publish them for a week or two and collect feedback rather than rapidly producing RC after RC. Maybe you want to use RC as a patch version or go one level further (2.0.8.1, etc.)? In any event, the downside of not publishing a build is that you can't call it a "release" and get the widespreader usage than the die-hard Maven watchers.
Paul On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 4:25 PM, Brian E. Fox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > In an attempt to raise quality and reduce/eliminate regressions in the > core releases, we are experimenting with a new release process. The old > process had a few informal staged builds followed by one or more > official staged builds that where voted on. Clearly this didn't attract > enough testing prior to the official release to identify regressions or > other major issues. > > > The new process we are using for the 2.0.9 release is to cut actual > release candidate (RC-XXX) releases. These are released with the normal > release process so it generates a tag, but do not get sync'd to central. > We have gone through several RCs[1] as we tested on the dev@ list. The > next step is to open it up to the user list for fix validation and > regression identification. This is really the first time we've followed > such a process so we'll have to see how it pans out. > > Paul
