This is a guide for the verification of a release candidate of Apache Accumulo. These steps are meant to encapsulate the requirements of the PMC set forth by the Foundation itself.
The information here is meant to be an application of Foundation policy. When in doubt or conflict, any Foundation-level trumps anything written here.
Accumulo has adopted Semantic Versioning and follows their rules and guidelines.
Each release of Accumulo should be tested by the community to verify correctness.
Below are some suggested tests that can be run (feel free to run your own custom tests too):
Run Accumulo's unit and integration tests using the following command:
$ mvn verify
Build the Accumulo Examples repo using the release candidate by updating the accumulo.version property in the pom.xml and using the staging repo. Also, run the unit/integration tests using mvn verify.
Run Accumulo's distributed tests (i.e. random walk, continuous ingest). These tests are intended to be run for days on end while injecting faults into the system. These are the tests that truly verify the correctness of Accumulo on real systems. Starting with 2.0, these tests are run using the Accumulo Testing repo. See the README.md for more information. Before 2.0, these tests are found in Accumulo tarball at test/system/randomwalk and test/system/continuous which include instructions on how to run the tests.
While contributors do not need perform all tests, there should a minimum amount of testing done by the project as whole before a release is made.
Testing for an Accumulo release includes a few steps that a developer may take without a Hadoop cluster and several that require a working cluster. For minor releases, the tests which run on a Hadoop cluster are recommended to be completed but are not required. Running even a reduced set of tests against real hardware is always encouraged even if the full test suite (in breadth of nodes or duration) is not executed. If PMC members do not believe adequate testing was performed for the sake of making the proposed release, the release should be vetoed via the normal voting process. New major releases are expected to run a full test suite.
The following steps can be taken without having an underlying cluster. They SHOULD be handled with each Hadoop profile available for a given release version. To activate an alternative profile specify e.g. “-Dhadoop.profile=2” for the Hadoop 2 profile on the Maven commandline. Some older versions of Accumulo referred to Hadoop profiles differently; see the README that came with said versions for details on building against different Hadoop versions.
The following tests require a Hadoop cluster running a minimum of HDFS, MapReduce, and ZooKeeper. The cluster MAY have any number of worker nodes; it can even be a single node in pseudo-distributed mode. A cluster with multiple tablet servers SHOULD be used so that more of the code base will be exercised. For the purposes of release testing, you should note the number of nodes and versions used. See the Releasing section for more details.
The ASF requires that all artifacts in a release are cryptographically signed and distributed with hashes.
OpenPGP is an asymmetric encryption scheme which lends itself well to the globally distributed nature of Apache. Verification of a release artifact can be done using the signature and the release-maker's public key. Hashes can be verified using the appropriate command (e.g. sha1sum, md5sum).
An Apache release must contain a source-only artifact. This is the official release artifact. While a release of an Apache project can contain other artifacts that do contain binary files. These non-source artifacts are for user convenience only, but still must adhere to the same licensing rules.
PMC members should take steps to verify that the source-only artifact does not contain any binary files. There is some leeway in this rule. For example, test-only binary artifacts (such as test files or jars) are acceptable as long as they are only used for testing the software and not running it.
The following are the aforementioned Foundation-level documents provided for reference:
Application of the Apache Software License v2 consists of the following steps on each artifact in a release. It's important to remember that for artifacts that contain other artifacts (e.g. a tarball that contains JAR files or an RPM which contains JAR files), both the tarball, RPM and JAR files are subject to the following roles.
The difficulty in verifying each artifact is that, often times, each artifact requires a different LICENSE and NOTICE file. For example, the Accumulo binary tarball must contain appropriate LICENSE and NOTICE files considering the bundled jar files in lib/. The Accumulo source tarball would not contain these same contents in the LICENSE and NOTICE files as it does not contain those same JARs.
The LICENSE file should be present at the top-level of the artifact. This file should be explicitly named LICENSE, however LICENSE.txt is acceptable but not preferred. This file contains the text of the Apache Software License at the top of the file. At the bottom of the file, all other open source licenses contained in the given artifact must be listed at the bottom of the LICENSE file. Contained components that are licensed with the ASL themselves do not need to be included in this file. It is common to see inclusions in file such as the MIT License of 3-clause BSD License.
The NOTICE file should be present at the top-level of the artifact beside the LICENSE file. This file should be explicitly name NOTICE, while NOTICE.txt is also acceptable but not preferred. This file contains the copyright notice for the artifact being released. As a reminder, the copyright is held by the Apache Software Foundation, not the individual project.
The second purpose this file serves is to distribute third-party notices from dependent software. Specifically, other code which is licensed with the ASLv2 may also contain a NOTICE file. If such an artifact which contains a NOTICE file is contained in artifact being verified for releases, the contents of the contained artifact‘s NOTICE file should be appended to this artifact’s NOTICE file. For example, Accumulo bundles the Apache Thrift libthrift JAR file which also have its own NOTICE file. The contents of the Apache Thrift NOTICE file should be included within Accumulo's NOTICE file.