How to Release

This document describes how to make a release of Flume. It is a work in progress and should be refined by the Release Manager (RM) as they come across aspects of the release process not yet documented here.

NOTE: For the purpose of illustration, this document assumes that the version being released is 1.0.0, and the following development version will become 1.1.0.

Prerequisites

Policy documents

The policy on releasing artifacts from an incubating Apache project is stated in the Guide to Release Management During Incubation. While Flume is now a top-level project, that guide is still a good resource for new release managers since it contains what are considered to be best practices.

The Release Manager (RM) must go through the policy document to understand all the tasks and responsibilities of running a release.

Give a heads up

The RM should first create an umbrella issue and then setup a timeline for release branch point. The time for the day the umbrella issue is created to the release branch point must be at least two weeks in order to give the community a chance to prioritize and commit any last minute features and issues they would like to see in the upcoming release.

The RM should then send the pointer to the umbrella issue along with the tentative timeline for branch point to the user and developer lists. Any work identified as release related that needs to be completed should be added as a subtask of the umbrella issue to allow users to see the overall release progress in one place.

TODO: Add an email template to send out

JIRA cleanup

Before a release is done, make sure that any issues that are fixed have their fixVersion setup correctly. Run the following JIRA query to see which resolved issues do not have their fix version set up correctly:

project = Flume and Resolution = Fixed and fixVersion is EMPTY

The result of the above query should be empty. If some issues do show up in this query that have been fixed since the last release, please bulk-edit them to set the fix version to the version being released.

Since the JIRA release note tool will list all JIRAs associated with a particular fixVersion regardless of their Resolution, you may want to remove fixVersion on issues declared as "Duplicate", "Won't Fix", "Works As Expected", etc. You can use this query to find those issues, then just bulk edit them and leave the fixVersion field blank when editing them. (Note that you will need to replace "v1.0.0" below with the version you are trying to release.)

project = Flume and Resolution != Unresolved AND Resolution != Fixed AND fixVersion = "v1.0.0"

Finally, check out the output of the JIRA release note tool to see which JIRAs are included in the release, in order to do a sanity check.

Monitor active issues

It is important that between the time that the umbrella issue is filed to the time when the release branch is created, no experimental or potentially destabilizing work is checked into the trunk. While it is acceptable to introduce major changes, they must be thoroughly reviewed and have good test coverage to ensure that the release branch does not start of being unstable.

If necessary the RM can discuss if certain issues should be fixed on the trunk in this time, and if so what is the gating criteria for accepting them.

Creating Release Artifacts

Communicate with the community

1. Send an email to dev@flume.apache.org to

Notify that you are about to branch.
Ask to hold off any commits until this is finished.

2. Send another email after branching is done.

Create a release branch

1. Checkout the trunk.

svn checkout https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/flume/trunk

2. Update CHANGELOG in the trunk to indicate the changes going into the new version.

The change list can be swiped from the JIRA release note tool (use the "text" format for the change log). See JIRA Cleanup above to ensure that the release notes generated by this tool are what you are expecting.

3. Update the "version" value of all pom.xml in trunk to "1.0.0".

4. Commit back to the trunk.

svn commit -m "Preparing for release 1.0.0"

5. Create a branch.

svn copy https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/flume/trunk \
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/flume/branches/branch-1.0.0 \
-m "Branching for 1.0.0 releases"

6. Update the "oldversion" value of all pom.xml in the trunk to "1.0.0".

7. Update the "version" value of all pom.xml in the trunk to "1.1.0-SNAPSHOT".

8. Commit back to the trunk.

svn commit -m "Preparing for release 1.1.0 development"

9. Tag a candidate, where R (starting from 0) is the iteration number for this candidate:

svn copy https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/flume/branches/branch-1.0.0 \
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/flume/tags/flume-1.0.0-rc0 \
-m "flume 1.0.0-rc0 release."

Update the LICENSE file

The release manager is responsible for updating the LICENSE file to provide accurate license information for all binary artifacts contained in the codebase. This is a tedious and painstaking process, and must be performed for each release that includes a binary artifact.

Performing sanity check

1. Check out the candidate

svn checkout https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/flume/tags/flume-1.0.0-rc0

2. Generate a tarball

cd flume-1.0.0-rc0
mvn clean install -DskipTests

3. Unpack the source tarball

cd flume-ng-dist/target
tar xzvf apache-flume-1.0.0-src.tar.gz

4. Do another full build inside the source tarball. This time, allow all unit tests & integration tests to run

cd apache-flume-1.0.0
mvn clean install

Signatures and Checksums

All artifacts must be signed and checksummed. In order to sign a release you will need a PGP key. You should get your key signed by a few other people. You will also need to recv their keys from a public key server. See the Apache release signing page for more details.

1. Add your key to the KEYS file:

(gpg --list-sigs <your-email> && gpg --armor --export <your-email>) >> KEYS

And commit the changes.

2. Sign the artifacts:

gpg --armor --output apache-flume-1.2.0-bin.tar.gz.asc --detach-sig apache-flume-1.2.0-bin.tar.gz
gpg --armor --output apache-flume-1.2.0.tar.gz.asc --detach-sig apache-flume-1.2.0.tar.gz

3. Checksum the artifacts:

md5 -r apache-flume-1.2.0-bin.tar.gz > apache-flume-1.2.0-bin.tar.gz.md5sum
md5 -r apache-flume-1.2.0.tar.gz > apache-flume-1.2.0.tar.gz.md5sum
shasum apache-flume-1.2.0-bin.tar.gz > apache-flume-1.2.0-bin.tar.gz.sha1sum
shasum apache-flume-1.2.0.tar.gz > apache-flume-1.2.0.tar.gz.sha1sum

Note: the checksum files must be named .md5sum and .sha1sum or the mirrors will not pick them up.

Running the vote

Call for dev list votes

Send an email to dev@flume.apache.org list. For example,

To: dev@flume.apache.org
Subject: [VOTE] Release Apache Flume version 1.2.0

This is the first release for Apache Flume as a top-level project,
version 1.2.0. We are voting on release candidate rc0.

*** Please cast your vote within the next 72 hours ***

The list of fixed issues:
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/flume/tags/flume-1.2.0-rc0/CHANGELOG

The tarball (*.tar.gz), signature (*.asc), and checksums (*.md5sum, *.sha1sum)
for the source and binary artifacts can be found at:
https://people.apache.org/~mpercy/flume/apache-flume-1.2.0-rc0/

The tag to be voted on:
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/flume/tags/flume-1.2.0-rc0

The KEYS file can be found here:
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/flume/dist/KEYS

You need 3 +1 votes from Flume PMC members for a release.

Rolling out the Release

Upload the artifacts

Source and convenience artifacts

svn checkout https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/release/flume dist-flume
cd dist-flume
mkdir 1.0.0
cp <all release artifacts including asc/checksum files> 1.0.0/
svn rm stable # remove older version link
ln -s 1.0.0 stable # update stable version link
svn add stable 1.0.0
svn commit

It may take up to 24 hours for all mirrors to sync up.

Deploy Maven artifacts

General instructions on how to deploy the poms and jars to Maven Central can be found at the Apache page on publishing maven artifacts.

Flume-specific instructions:

After you get your settings.xml file configured correctly (see above link) then you can run: mvn clean deploy -DskipTests -Papache-release to push the artifacts to the staging repo.
You will need to go to the Apache Maven Repository @ http://repository.apache.org/ and log in with your Apache LDAP credentials
Once you log in you will see Build Promotion > Staging Repositories on the left hand side
You will want to edit the Flume artifacts that you don't want to push to Maven (you can delete stuff like the release tarball)
Click Close to make the artifatcs available on the Staging repository.
To push to Central, you click Release.

Announce the release

Send an email to announce@apache.org (the from: address must be @apache.org). For example,

To: announce@apache.org, flume-user@incubator.apache.org, flume-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: ANNOUNCE Apache Flume 1.0.0 released

The Apache Flume team is pleased to announce the release of Flume 1.0.0
from the Apache Incubator.

This is the first incubator release of Apache flume, a tool designed for efficiently
transferring bulk data between Apache Hadoop and structured datastores, such as
relational databases.

The release is available here:http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/incubator/flume/

The full change log is available here:https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=12311320&version=12317345

Your help and feedback is more than welcome. For more information on how to report problems
and to get involved, visit the project website at http://incubator.apache.org/flume/.

The Apache Flume Team