Hi guys, I would like to propose some improvements on our release.
1. Predictable & regular release pace We started this discussion quickly on the 1.4.0 vote thread: I think it would be interesting for the community (both our users and also companies leveraging Iceberg in their products) to have a regular & predictable release pace. It would give a kind of roadmap/expected dates for our users. According to our previous release dates, I propose to target a release per quarter. It doesn't mean that we won't be able to release faster (if we want to quickly include a fix or CVE or whatever, we can always cut a release), but we would have a minimum of one release per quarter. As today, the versioning will be discussed on the mailing list. Website (https://iceberg.apache.org/releases/) should contain this information and the next release target date. 2. Post release actions I propose some new actions post release: 2.1. Prepare an announcement email that will be sent to dev@iceberg.apache.org and (also important) to annou...@apache.org. The last "official" announcement we did was for Iceberg 1.0.0. As annou...@apache.org is "processed" by the ASF communication team, and Iceberg releases will be included in the ASF updates. The release guide (https://iceberg.apache.org/how-to-release/) already contains this point, but it seems we missed annou...@apache.org (it's not obvious in the guide). I propose to be clearer on this point. 2.2. Write a blog post with highlights on the release. This "release highlights blog post" should be on https://iceberg.apache.org/blogs/. For instance, for 1.4.0, we could mention Spark 3.5 support, push down function, distributed planning, etc. 2.3. When we update src distribution on dist.apache.org, we should clean the previous release. Right now, https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/release/iceberg/ contains all releases. ASF automatically copies all releases from dist.apache.org to archive.apache.org (see https://archive.apache.org/dist/iceberg/). Only the latest release should be on dist.apache.org, we should remove previous releases and use archive.apache.org instead. I will propose a PR for the website to use archive.apache.org for previous releases and cleanup previous releases. So, the action proposal here is to remove previous release artifacts after new release upload. Again, the release guide (https://iceberg.apache.org/how-to-release/) mentions the upload of artifacts, but not the cleanup. 2.4. We have a PR to upload the Iceberg DOAP file to the iceberg repo (https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/8586). I propose to update the DOAP file with new release (I will update the PR with all releases). If you agree with these topics, I'm volunteer to update the Release Guide (https://iceberg.apache.org/how-to-release/) with these points. I'm also volunteering for the next release to test/validate this process. Thoughts ? Thanks, Regards JB
