...

1. You need to be a commiter
2. Basic Rya
   1. Checkout, build, test Rya
3. Setting up PGP
   1. Getting software
   2. creating a key
   3. publishing a key
   4. adding your key to id.apache.org
4. Setting up Maven to push to apache repo
   1. Username/pass in maven settings
5. Testing settings
   1. Testing locally: 
      1. mvn clean install -Papache-release

   2. Testing by pushing to apache snapshot repo

      1. mvn clean deploy -Papache-release

6. Use gpg-agent, and be sure to increase the gpg-agent cache timeout (via .gnupg/gpg-agent.conf) to ensure that the agent doesn’t require re-authentication mid-build, as it will cause things to fail. For example, you can add default-cache-ttl 6000 to increase the timeout from the default of 10 minutes to over an hour. If you do not have a GPG key, reference the very thorough ASF release signing documentation. (make sure you reset gpg-agent)

Staging a release

note: I followed these instructions: http://www.apache.org/dev/publishing-maven-artifacts.html#prepare-poms

...