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