Improve release process

[Philippe Mouawad <ph...@gmail.com>]

Hello,
I was wondering if there would be a way to simplify / fully automate
release ?

Currently, the process seems very manual from my understanding and takes
some time, @Milamber how much time does it take on your side ?

Doing so would make us much more reactive at least in preparing release .
We would still have to wait 72 hours for votes.

-- 
Regards
Philippe

Re: Improve release process

[Milamber <mi...@apache.org>]

Hello,

The release process is describe here [1]. Probably some tasks could be 
automate (using some shell scripts), but the process include some tasks 
with pause time like the sync of mirror or the vote time (72h).
Some tasks like the adding of new number version into Bugzilla, the GPG 
sign distribution files or the maven upload artecfacts on nexus needs 
some credentials so that could be difficult to automate.
Some tasks needs manual checks by human like the Javadoc warnings 
message (note: currently the trunk have a lot of Javadoc warnings) when 
you build the distribution or the RAT report, or manual tasks on Nexus 
Web UI to promote the release.

To release a new RC, generally, I spends ~2h for the RC 1 (with manual 
checks and including the time to wait the upload of the distribution 
files), and ~1h for the RC 2+
After a success vote, around 30 min to promote the release, and another 
~30 min after the sync of mirrors to send the announces and update the 
wiki (asf)/wikipedia (en/fr/es/ge).

For me, the main issue to release often and quickly is to prepare the 
New and Noteworthy page with some screenshots of new features and the 
summary of the major changes. If this page is ready and the PMC are Ok 
to release, the release process can be done speedy.

Milamber

[1] https://wiki.apache.org/jmeter/ReleaseCreation


On 07/02/2017 21:39, Philippe Mouawad wrote:
> Hello,
> I was wondering if there would be a way to simplify / fully automate
> release ?
>
> Currently, the process seems very manual from my understanding and takes
> some time, @Milamber how much time does it take on your side ?
>
> Doing so would make us much more reactive at least in preparing release .
> We would still have to wait 72 hours for votes.
>