hi folks, I wrote up a document describing the work involved with an Arrow release:
https://github.com/apache/arrow/blob/master/dev/release/RELEASE_MANAGEMENT.md I've managed the last 7 releases -- I think it would be good for others committers or PMC members to be exposed to the work involved with an Arrow release so we can build some tools to assist with automating routine matters. Since the release vote already takes 3 days, it would be good to get to a point where we have all of the post-release tasks handled within 48 hours of a release vote closing. In practice this has meant that I lose anywhere from 4 to 10 hours of productive hours (i.e. a whole working day) to doing this work. It is important for the growth of the Arrow community that we release frequently and do not delay with updating binary packages after the source artifacts are finalized. There are also a number of tasks, like updating the Python conda packages, which do not require PMC / committer karma to help update, so there's opportunities for other members of the community to earn karma through non-code contributions helping update these packages. I want to point out that these packages have each had over 100,000 downloads since the project started (https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/pyarrow) -- increasingly the rapid deployment of new versions of our software will be important for the health of the ecosystem. By their nature, the Arrow libraries will be used as dependencies of other projects. thanks! Wes
