On Mar 29, 2010, at 8:11 AM, Matt Benson wrote: >> >> What was the release process for the sandbox component you and Ralph >> released? >> > > To be precise, Ralph and I had worked with Nexus on separate components, and > as those were sandbox components it goes without saying that they've not been > through the entire release process. We've only published snapshots, and as > far as that's concerned, it's not _that_ huge a difference. I feel that I > have had less trouble publishing snapshots to Nexus than I had to p.a.o, > though it's been so long I honestly can't recall what precisely my problems > were--I have a dim recollection of the whole process going to hell and my > having to manually delete stuff from p.a.o to get things working. I also > mentioned that "this is the way the wind is blowing": it would appear that > the entire ASF is moving toward using repository.a.o and in this case there's > not much point in my trying to sell it, particularly as I personally am not > known to be a big fan of mvn in general. :P However, I will continue with > my stammering attempt to explain the additional benefits of this change, at > risk of failure due to my admittedly shallow understanding of the whole > process. The primary benefit to the release cycle, as I understand it, is > the support of the staging step. From what I can glean from the > documentation, it would seem that when Nexus is used as the target repository > of a release, a temporary "staging repository" is generated for your release. > You then provide the staging repository's URL as the basis for the release > vote, and, once the vote is successfully completed, you use the Nexus UI to > promote the entire staging repo to public availability. In particular, the > best soup-to-nuts detail is to be had from > http://maven.apache.org/developers/release/apache-release.html which purports > to be a start-to-finish guide for releasing _any_ Maven-based ASF project. > Noting that our own Commons release instructions have never _seemed_ > fully-baked (and this is meant with no offense to any of the contributors to > said documentation), what's available from the mvn team would presumably be a > step forward to making the release process less onerous. The referenced URL > also mentions things like cutting the release tag for you, but I am pretty > sure this is functionality that has existed in mvn for quite some time; in > fact the details of how to support the RC-based approach we use @ Commons > would be my only question/concern. As a member of both the Commons and Maven > PMCs, and the other "suspect" in this case, I wonder if Ralph would have more > useful details for us here; Dennis's input would be similarly welcome. >
I assume I am the Ralph you are referring to? To be fair, when I was trying to get the Maven 2 build to work for VFS I knew Brian Fox was setting up the Nexus repositories for Apache and that they were meant to replace the existing infrastructure. As I recall he gave me the settings to use to publish to it, but VFS has not had any releases to validate it. I've been using Nexus at work for a year, I know the central repo is running on Nexus and I know the Apache repo Brian set up has been running for a while now. I see no reason not to use it. My understanding is that that repository is where Maven central expects to find new ASF artifacts. Other than that, I don't know that I have much useful info to provide, however I am sure that Brian Fox would be happy to provide more guidance if needed. Ralph
