Voting on releases

[Henry Zongaro <zo...@ca.ibm.com>]

Hello.

I thought I'd forward this piece of mail that was part of a discussion on 
the legal-discuss mailing list.  See [1] for the complete thread, which 
started as a discussion of whether NOTICE and LICENSE files have to be in 
the source repository for a project, and if so, where.

The thing to note is that the Xalan PMC has been using style two for 
voting on releases.  For any future releases, the PMC will have to move to 
style four.  Of course, the PMC can still have a vote on the tag that will 
be the basis of the release, but there must be a final vote on the built, 
signed distributions themselves.

hyandell@gmail.com wrote on 2007-12-20 05:25:19 PM:
> On Dec 20, 2007 1:48 PM, Roy T. Fielding <fi...@gbiv.com> wrote:
> > On Dec 20, 2007, at 12:48 AM, Guillaume Nodet wrote:
> >
> > > PMCs can vote on a tag / branch by building the release from this
> > > tag / branch and examine the artifacts generated to make sure they
> > > are ok.  I don't see any problem with that.  Imho, it's up to the
> > > PMC to choose between voting on binaries and voting on a tag.
> >
> > PMCs can vote on just about anything.  However, a release vote is on
> > a packaged artifact containing the complete source code and signed
> > by the release manager.  If you haven't voted on that, the PMC has
> > not performed a valid release.
> >
> > Binaries are generated from release source packages. If the PMC is
> > doing something else, then it has seriously screwed the pooch and
> > may not even be releasing open source.
> 
> There are four styles that I've seen referenced while on the board:
> 
> 1) Voting on the intention. Someone then goes ahead and does the work
> and releases. This is BAD.
> 
> 2) Voting on the tag. Someone then goes ahead and does all the work
> and releases. This is BAD.
> 
> 3) Voting on an RC. This is a tag that has been built, voted on, and
> then rebuilt to get the naming right in the filename/documentation.
> This is increasingly frowned upon and I suspect is considered BAD now,
> but I don't recall this being stated as policy anywhere.
> 
> 4) Voting on the build itself. This is GOOD. Commons used to use 3)
> and moved over to 4) six to twelve months ago.
> 
> I suspect we need to be stating all this on
> http://www.apache.org/dev/release.html. Currently the words 'vote' and
> 'pmc' do not appear there.

Thanks,

Henry
[1] 
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-legal-discuss/200712.mbox/thread
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Henry Zongaro      XSLT Processors Development
IBM SWS Toronto Lab   T/L 313-6044;  Phone +1 905 413-6044
mailto:zongaro@ca.ibm.com