After getting tired of downloading RCs and checking sigs and other stuff, I decided to try to automate some of it. I posted the Ant script I used for the SDK here: http://people.apache.org/~aharui/approverelease/
It worked for my mac. Haven't tried it on Windows. If folks like it we could check it in somewhere. It could be enhanced to check binary packages looking to make sure the -config.xml files are correct, etc. -Alex