Maintaining Beam Dependencies

[Yifan Zou <yi...@google.com>]

Hi all,

As from today, we start filing JIRA issues automatically for tracking Beam
dependency updates based on the weekly report
<https://builds.apache.org/job/beam_Dependency_Check/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/src/build/dependencyUpdates/beam-dependency-check-report.html>.
Issues will be created by the Beam JIRA Bot for each one of the dependency
listed in the report and assign to the owners. And the Java dep issues will
be grouped by their groupID that allows contributors easily see the upgrade
process of related packages. A sample issue is here: BEAM-4963
<https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/BEAM-4963>

Keeping dependencies healthy is very important to make the perfect user
experience and let the development process being smooth. And maintaining on
our dependencies will be a continuous, incremental improvements that
requires the whole community to make efforts. So, please:

1. Taking care of the JIRA dependency upgrade requests assigned to you. If
the version is not good to upgrade for some reasons, you could close the
issue with 'won't fix', this will prevent the jira bot creating duplicate
issues.

2. If you are familiar with some packages which Beam depends on, you are
encouraged to take the ownership and help the community to look after
them. You can add your JIRA username in the dependency ownership files:
https://github.com/apache/beam/tree/master/ownership

3. Please also update the ownership files when introducing new dependencies
into Beam.

Please refer to the Dependencies Guide
<https://beam.apache.org/contribute/dependencies/> for more details.

Thank you very much.

Regards.
Yifan Zou