Currently, this is just a collection area for my rough notes and what-not.  It will soon be a much cleaner guide.

Speaking of guides, here are a bunch of good ones:

http://accumulo.apache.org/releasing.html
http://accumulo.apache.org/verifying_releases.html
http://nifi.apache.org/release-guide.html

http://yetus.apache.org/contribute/releases/

How to Release Sqoop2

Basic Outline:

Dependencies

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:

   echo RELOADAGENT | gpg-connect-agent

   )

Staging a release

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

1. Update Rya
2. Build a push a signed snapshot

   1. mvn clean deploy -Papache-release

3. Do some manual checks (note I think that the mvn release plugin does all of this)

   1. Make sure there are no dependencies on snapshots in the POMs to be released
      

   2. Check that your POMs will not lose content when they are rewritten during the release process
      

      1. mvn release:prepare -Papache-release -DdryRun=true -Darguments="-DskipTests"
         

      2. Diff the original file pom.xml with the one called pom.xml.tag to see if the license or any other info has been removed

      3. What is the release version for "Apache Rya Project"? (org.apache.rya:rya-project) 3.2.10: : 

         What is SCM release tag or label for "Apache Rya Project"? (org.apache.rya:rya-project) rya-project-3.2.10: : 3.2.10

         What is the new development version for "Apache Rya Project"? (org.apache.rya:rya-project) 3.2.11-SNAPSHOT: : 

         
         

4. Prepare release

   1. mvn release:clean

   2. mvn release:prepare

5. Stage release for a vote

   1. mvn release:perform

       

References:

http://www.apache.org/dev/publishing-maven-artifacts.html