Hi Daniel,
Have a look through Apache's offical _Release Policy_ and _Release
Distribution Policy_ documents.
http://www.apache.org/legal/release-policy
http://www.apache.org/dev/release-distribution
Those policy documents (not the accompanying FAQs, just the Policies) are
canonical.
On Wed, Dec 30, 2015 at 6:55 AM, Daniel Dekany <ddek...@freemail.hu> wrote:
> We at project FreeMarker intend to issue a Release Candidate under
> https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/incubator/. Note that it's just
> "dev", not "release".
Good so far... the `dev` section of `dist.apache.org` is precisely the right
place to upload release candidates to share with other members of the
FreeMarker dev community.
> There will be both source and binary RC release artifacts.
OK, but please note the source and binary archives are not equal. The source
archive is the official release and (from the perspective of the Foundation)
the binary is optional.
> As I understand, this so far doesn't require any voting, as
> it will be the subject of the later voting (on dev@freemaker first).
Correct -- putting the RC archive into the `dev` section of `dist.apache.org`
does not require previous PMC approval.
> The binary artifact will be linked on the top of the FreeMarker
> homepage for testing for one month. At least this is how it was done
> prior ASF. An RC like that used to have around a 50-100 downloads
> during the RC period (plus the Maven staging repo downloads), so
> hopefully it's not a technical issue that it's a download directly
> from "repos".
There are two problems here.
First, please do not expose unreleased materials to people outside the dev
community.
http://www.apache.org/legal/release-policy#publication
... Projects MUST direct outsiders towards official releases rather than
raw source repositories, nightly builds, snapshots, release candidates, or
any other similar packages. The only people who are supposed to know about
such developer resources are individuals actively participating in
development or following the dev list and thus aware of the conditions
placed on unreleased materials.
Second, please do not provide any direct links to the ASF's subversion
repositories from public-facing download pages. This holds not only for
release candidates but also for approved official releases. Anything that
ends up in the `release` section of `dist.apache.org` is also available from
the ASF mirror network -- please use the mirror network for distribution to
the general public.
> Is this procedure OK in ASF? I mean, we *kind of* publish something
> that wasn't voted on, at least not on incubator general.
If it is important to you for the user community to test out a version of the
software before it become official, the solution is to run two VOTEs: one for
the beta (or whatever you want to call it) and one for the final release.
Hope this helps,
Marvin Humphrey
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