5.5. Podling releases

Up: 5. Making releases

Prev: 5.4. Archiving and lifecycle

Next: 6. Release catalog

Sections:

• Overview
• Composing a podling release
• The two rounds of voting
• Finishing a podling release

Overview

A Podling is a project in the Apache Incubator, and its committee is a PPMC. A podling release goes through the same compose, vote, and finish phases as any other release, but incubation policy adds some requirements. The main one is that a podling release must be approved twice: first by the podling's own PPMC, and then by the Incubator PMC. ATR runs these as two rounds of voting on the same candidate.

ATR knows whether a committee is a podling from the ASF's own records, so there is nothing for you to configure. The differences described on this page apply automatically.

Composing a podling release

Two of ATR's checks apply extra rules to a podling, and both report a blocker if the rule is not met, so the candidate cannot proceed to a vote until it is fixed:

• Every artifact file name must include the word incubating.
• Every source archive must have a DISCLAIMER or DISCLAIMER-WIP file in its root directory.

Expedited releases are not available to podlings.

The two rounds of voting

You start a podling vote in the same way as any other, from the compose page. The differences are these:

• First round. The vote is held by the PPMC, on the podling's own mailing list. It cannot be held on the podling's private@ list. When you start the vote, you also choose the list that the second round will be sent to, which is general@incubator.apache.org.
• Moving to the second round. When you resolve the first round as passed, ATR does not move the release on to the finish phase. Instead it starts the second round straight away, sending a new vote email to the Incubator list. The second round is held on the same revision, with the same duration, using your project's vote email template.
• Second round. The vote is held by the Incubator PMC. When you resolve it as passed, the release moves on to the finish phase, and ATR sends the result to the second round thread and also, as a reply, to the first round thread.

If either round fails or is canceled, the candidate returns to the compose phase. A later vote on the revised candidate starts again from the first round.

Whose vote counts differs between the rounds, and ATR labels votes to match:

A PPMC member who is not also a member of the Incubator PMC therefore has a formal vote in the first round, but a non-binding vote in the second.

Some options on the vote form behave differently for a podling:

• If you ask ATR to publish the release automatically when the vote resolves, that choice is carried over to the second round, and publication happens once the second round passes.
• Automatic vote resolution, which is offered in the Trusted vote mode, is not available for the first round.
• A podling release cannot use the Manual vote mode, in which a vote is held outside ATR and its result recorded afterwards. It must go through the two rounds described here.

See Vote phase and Staging and voting for everything that is common to all votes.

Finishing a podling release

Podling releases are published under the Incubator's area of the distribution repository, rather than at the top level:

• Published files go to https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/release/incubator/<committee>/, and are served from https://downloads.apache.org/incubator/<committee>/.
• The committee's KEYS file lives in the same place, at https://downloads.apache.org/incubator/<committee>/KEYS.
• An SVN import during the compose phase reads from https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/incubator/<committee>/.

Promoting to release describes publication and announcement, which otherwise work as they do for any other release.

In the Release catalog, podlings are grouped together on a single Incubator page, rather than each having a card on the front page.