How to create and announce a Karaf release.

Required tools, practices and resources

• Use Maven 2.0.11 or greater.
• JDK 1.5 (We try to maintain compatibility)
• Each and every release must be SIGNED
• Your public key should also be cross-signed by other Apache committers (not required, but suggested)
• Make sure you have all Apache servers defined in your settings.xml

Prepare

To prepare and perform a release you must be at least at Apache Karaf Committer.

Your settings.xml should look like:

<settings>
  ...
  <profiles>
    <profile>
      <id>release</id>
      <properties>
        <gpg.passphrase> <!-- YOUR KEY PASSPHRASE --> </gpg.passphrase>
      </properties>
    </profile>
  </profiles>
  ...
  <servers>
    <!-- To publish a snapshot of some part of Maven -->
    <server>
      <id>apache.snapshots.https</id>
      <username> <!-- YOUR APACHE SVN USERNAME --> </username>
      <password> <!-- YOUR APACHE SVN PASSWORD --> </password>
    </server>
    <!-- To stage a release of some part of Maven -->
    <server>
      <id>apache.releases.https</id>
      <username> <!-- YOUR APACHE SVN USERNAME --> </username>
      <password> <!-- YOUR APACHE SVN PASSWORD --> </password>
    </server>
    ...
  </servers>
</settings>

Staging the Release Candidate

1. Grab the latest source

   svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/karaf/trunk

2. Prepare your POMs for release:
   1. make sure there is no snapshots in the POMs to be released
   2. make sure everything builds fine
   3. check that your POMs will not lose content when they are rewritten during the release process:

      mvn release:prepare -DdryRun

      Please diff the original pom.xml with the one named pom.xml.tag to see if the license or any other info has been removed. This has been known to happen if the starting <project> tag is not a single line. The only things that should be different between these files are the <version> and <scm> elements. If there are any other changes, you must fix the original pom.xml file and commit before proceeding with the release.
   4. publish a snapshot

      $ mvn deploy ... [INFO] [deploy:deploy] [INFO] Retrieving previous build number from apache.snapshots.https ...

      If you experience an error during deployment like a HTTP 401 check your settings for the required server entries as outlined in the Prerequisites
      Be sure that the generated artifacts respect the Apache release rules: NOTICE and LICENSE files should be present in the META-INF directory within the jar. For sources artifacts, be sure that your POM does not use the maven-source-plugin:2.0.3 which is broken. The recommended version at this time is 2.0.4
      You should verify the deployment under the snapshot repository on Apache
3. Prepare the release

   mvn release:clean mvn release:prepare

4. Stage the release for a vote

   mvn release:perform

• The release will automatically be inserted into a temporary staging repository for you, see the Nexus staging documentation for full details
• You can continue to use mvn release:prepare and mvn release:perform on other sub-projects as necessary on the same machine and they will be combined in the same staging repository

1. Close the staging repository
   TODO
2. Verify the staged artifacts
   TODO

Starting the vote

Propose a vote on the dev list with the closed issues, the issues left, and the staging repository - for example:

TODO

Wait for the Results

TODO

Canceling the Release

TODO

Promoting the Release

TODO

Update JIRA

TODO

Announcing the Karaf Release

TODO