Hi, I've noticed a pattern in some the board reports of PMCs who are beginning to experience difficulties. In a notable number of cases a significant part of the problem is difficulty in producing a release. The sorts of phrases I am seeing are along the lines of releases "are too difficult", "take too much effort" or "the person that used to do the releases is no longer active". I've seen this in projects of all sizes and maturity levels.
I've also experienced this in projects I have been involved in. Fortunately, in those cases the community was able to figure out the release process, simplify/automate it and document it, reducing the future risk to the project. To put some specifics on this to give an idea of what I am talking about. The documented Windows build process for Tomcat Native is this: http://tomcat.apache.org/native-doc/#Building/Windows which is fine if you want to test a patch or build it form source to use locally but is insufficient to produce a release. What the community then produced is this: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/TOMCAT/Building+the+Tomcat+Native+Connector+binaries+for+Windows This got me wondering. Is protecting projects from this sort of future problem something that could / should be addressed during incubation? I'm thinking of a graduation criteria long the lines of: "Is the release process clearly documented to the point that someone new to the project could produce a release build?" If there is general consensus on this, I'm happy to draft something to add to http://incubator.apache.org/guides/graduation.html#releases Thoughts? Mark --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
