[xwiki-devs] [Proposal] Install Nexus Professional & implement staging releases

Hi, I'd like to propose that we replace our Archiva install with Nexus Professional since it's much better and would allow us to do staged releases. For details on staged releases, see http://blogs.sonatype.com/people/2009/01/nexus-professional-what-is-staging/ Basically it means the workflow for releasing would be: 1) do a release as normal 2) nexus pro intercepts the release before it goes to our release repository and moves the artifacts to a temporary staging repository 3) an email is sent to the users/devs mailing list asking for people to test the staged release to ensure it works fine 4) we allow 1 to 2 days for testing 5) the release manager then goes in the nexus UI and either promotes the staged release as a release or discards it if important problems are found 6) the release manager then continues with the release by uploading the files to the OW2 repo, modify the xwiki.org web site, etc Note that we should move towards the goal of removing the need to have RCs and thus give us more time to provide added-value in our releases. This can only be done by increasing our quality and namely it means: A) Improving our test suite and test practices (no code should be released without tests) B) Improving our manual QA tests for the release to ensure nothing is amiss The idea of staged release implements the B) point above. Ideally we shouldn't find any problem at all during step 3) above and thus B) should just be a formality. In practice it's probably a good thing to have it, just to be extra careful and give us the ability to catch last minute errors. WDYT? Thanks -Vincent http://xwiki.com http://xwiki.org http://massol.net