more on release plans

Hi gang!

should've written this earlier I guess. There's no pressing need to read 
this but I want it documented a little :-D

Versioning
----------
Observation: we have rather a lot of small seperately versioned 
artifacts. That's a pain to maintain.

Suggestion: make that a lot of small coarsely versioned artifacts. 
That's easier to maintain. excalibur-fortress gets a single version, our 
component libraries get a single version.

I've already put this in place in SVN a few days back, basically the 
version is kept in a few parent project.xml files which are <extend/>ed. 
I've had good experience only with this technique, and its real simple. 
In doing so I've bumped all the version numbers to 1 bigger than the 
greatest individual number.

Distributions
-------------
Observation: we have rather a lot of small artifacts. If the 
distribution layout is ever ****ed up (like it was for avalon) and 
inconsistent, that's a pain to maintain.

Suggestion: we try really well to be consistent and automated. We set 
this up correctly once, then avoid touching most of it for a long time 
to come.

I would like to see us not ever modify the distribution directory 
manually, but do it all using maven.

Distribution layout
-------------------
There's two popular options:

1) the ASF distribution layout rules [1]. For each seperately 
distributed product we have this structure:

--- /www/www.apache.org/dist/excalibur
 |--- KEYS
 |--- excalibur-fortress
      |--- source/
            |--- excalibur-fortress-2.0-src.tar.gz
            |--- excalibur-fortress-2.0-src.tar.gz.asc
            |--- excalibur-fortress-2.0-src.zip
            |--- excalibur-fortress-2.0-src.zip.asc
       |--- binaries/
            |--- excalibur-fortress-2.0.tar.gz
            |--- excalibur-fortress-2.0.tar.gz.asc
            |--- excalibur-fortress-2.0.zip
            |--- excalibur-fortress-2.0.zip.asc
       |--- jars/
            |--- excalibur-fortress-api-2.0.jar
            |--- excalibur-fortress-api-2.0.jar.asc
            |--- excalibur-fortress-impl-2.0.jar
            |--- excalibur-fortress-impl-2.0.jar.asc
                 (symlink to excalibur-fortress-2.0.tar.gz)
       |--- excalibur-fortress-current.tar.gz.asc
                 (symlink to excalibur-fortress-2.0.tar.gz.asc)
       |--- excalibur-fortress-current-src.tar.gz
                 (symlink to excalibur-fortress-2.0-src.tar.gz)
       |--- excalibur-fortress-current-src.tar.gz.asc
                 (symlink to excalibur-fortress-2.0-src.tar.gz.asc)

2) we follow the standard way maven sets up the distribution layout. We 
have a structure like this:

--- /www/www.apache.org/dist/excalibur
 |--- KEYS
 |--- excalibur-fortress
      |--- distributions/
            |--- excalibur-fortress-2.0-src.tar.gz
            |--- excalibur-fortress-2.0-src.tar.gz.asc
            |--- excalibur-fortress-2.0-src.zip
            |--- excalibur-fortress-2.0-src.zip.asc
            |--- excalibur-fortress-2.0.tar.gz
            |--- excalibur-fortress-2.0.tar.gz.asc
            |--- excalibur-fortress-2.0.zip
            |--- excalibur-fortress-2.0.zip.asc
       |--- jars/
            |--- excalibur-fortress-api-2.0.jar
            |--- excalibur-fortress-api-2.0.jar.asc
            |--- excalibur-fortress-impl-2.0.jar
            |--- excalibur-fortress-impl-2.0.jar.asc

#2 is what peter implemented. The old excalibur and fortress releases 
over at avalon follow option #1, and its what most apache projects do as 
well. I changed the script to do things that way (which was actually 
remarkably easy).

download.cgi
------------
We need to create http://excalibur.apache.org/download.cgi.

distribution docs
-----------------
Currently, thinks like checkstyle and linkcheck reports are included in 
the distributions. I don't like that; I think the only thing we should 
distribute are the apidocs. Not so sure how to cleanly set that up. 
Suggestions?

release everything
------------------
I think it would be nice to have www.apache.org/dist/excalibur/ contain 
at least the latest version of all the stuff we're maintaining. For the 
stuff that we're totally done with (like compatibility), we can simply 
symlink to the materials in the ../avalon/ directory. For the other 
stuff, it is probably easiest to create some new releases.

I'm not planning to copy over or symlink over all the old releases 
manually. We can simply point to the materials in the avalon 
distribution directory from our download page.

I'd like to make this happen as soon as possible.

thoughts?


- LSD

[1] http://www.apache.org/dev/mirrors.html

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: 
dev-unsubscribe-Hlt6eto4P0rTxqt0kkDzDmD2FQJk+8+b@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: 
dev-help-Hlt6eto4P0rTxqt0kkDzDmD2FQJk+8+b@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Apache Excalibur Project -- URL: http://excalibur.apache.org/