Checking a Release Candidate

The purpose of this page is to provide guidelines for the kind of things to check for a Release Candidate before voting. As well as helping people checking releases, hopefully it will help Release Managers avoid some potential pitfalls / objections.

These are just some initial thoughts - hopefully others will add in their 2c - niallp

1. General Checks

• Has the release been tagged in Subversion?

• Are there open (non-enhancement) bugzilla tickets?

• Have any version-specific files been updated? (e.g. build.xml, Version.java)

2. Binary Distribution

• Are the NOTICE and LICENSE files included in the root directory?

• Are the NOTICE and LICENSE files included in jar?

• Is the jar's manifest file correct?

  • Check the component version number is correct.

  • Check the title and vendor.

  • Check the JDK version.

    • if the JDK version is higher than expected (e.g. JDK 1.4 rather than JDK 1.3) does the maven build have the compatibility option set?

  • Check the Built-By field.

    • If the name in the jar file does not match your ASF account name, rebuild with '-Duser.name=your-asf-account'.

• Check the documentation

  • Is the version information correct (has it been updated)?

  • Is the style in keeping with other Commons components

  • Is there adequate information on:

    • Releases

    • Mailing Lists

    • Dependencies

      • Are all dependencies appropriately licensed?

      • Are all dependencies released versions?

      • Dependency comments are good (indicating whether its required/optional/for testing/for the site generation) e.g. Resources

    • Issue Tracking - there are some good examples of custom issue tracking pages (see Validator or IO).

    • Project License

  • Do the JavaDocs look OK?

  • Are there any check style or javadoc warnings

  • Do all the links work for the local copy of the documentation?

• If you're a user of the component - can you give the RC a test run?

3. Source Distribution

• Are the NOTICE and LICENSE files included in the root directory?

• Is everything in the source repository included in the distro?

  • Files typically in the root directory

    • project.xml
    • maven.xml
    • project.properties
    • (maybe) build.xml
    • Checkstyle files (xml config, checkstyle headers file)

  • Are the contents of the source directory present

  • Are the contents of the xdocs directory present

  • Are configuration files / directories present?

  • Are there any additional files included that are not in the source repository?
    • e.g. SVN files, log files, temporary distribution directories

• Can the project be built (e.g. run "maven dist" or relevant ant command) from the source distribution (note the commons-build directory will need to be available)?

  • do the tests run?

  • is the jar correctly generated

  • do the distribution files generated (i.e. binary/source zip/tar.gz files) match the ones for the release (md5's and bytecounts may be different and diffs may fail if checking is done on a different platform than that used to cut the release)?

Other pages which might be of interest

• ReleaseShoppingList