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Who can make a release?

Any member of committer on the Apache SpamAssassin project (committers) can make a release designated with Apache.

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The release is coordinated by the Release Manager (RM). Since this job requires coordination of the development community (and access to SVN), only committers to the project can be RM. However, there is no set RM. Any committer may perform a release at any time. In order to facilitate communication, it is deemed polite to alert the community with your planned release schedule before executing the release. A release should only be made when there is a plan to publicly release it. (A release should not be made only for private distribution. A private release is more suitable for that.)

Who may make a good candidate for an RM?

Someone with lots of time to kill. Being an RM is a very important job in our community because it takes a fair amount of time to produce a stable release. In general, our experience has shown that a well-coordinated release fares better than non-coordinated releases.

When do I know if it is a good time to release?

It is our convention to indicate blocking issues in Bugzilla with the severity set to critical. A showstopper entry does not automatically imply that a release cannot be made. As the RM has final authority on what makes it into a release, they can choose to ignore the entries.

An item being denoted as critical indicates that the group has come to a consensus that no further releases can be made until the entry is resolved.

In addition, prePre-releases may be more acceptable to the community still be issued with one or more showstopper bugs, however.

What power does the RM yield?

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The RM must follow the release procedure defined in build/README. This is project policy set by the PMC and is not optional. Once the tree has been suitably tested by the RM and any other interested parties and the required procedure (including three +1 votes) has been followed, they should "roll" the release out. Of those 3 votes, 1 generally comes from the RM, and 2 from other committers.

What can I call this release?

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