It's Friday night; Are you pondering what I'm pondering?

Pinky:  Uh, I think so, Brain, but why would I pour a bottle of wine into the Computer?
...

Well it IS Friday night and I am here pondering getting the Apache Karaf 2.1.4 release candidate process going. There has been a number of updates to the Karaf infrastructure so lets review them before we dive into the release candidate fun!

First off, the main Karaf web site is now powered by Scalate. This means that instead of editing a wiki page in place then saving it to publish, we now check out the site source code, edit and review it (in our editor of choice), then deploy it to website. See the 'how do I edit the website' page for more details.

The project's JIRA instance has now been upgraded to Altassian JIRA 4.2.2 by the Apache Infrastructure team. The new interface takes a little time to get used to, but it's soo much faster to use than before :)

Finally, we've added to the Hudson build profile a Karaf view. This simplifies the process of finding out the current build status of Apache Karaf's various versions.

Now that the above has been discussed, lets look at some changes to the Apache Karaf Release Guide. There have been two recent additions to the guide; the first regarding community awareness, and the second on publishing the Karaf manual.

To help communicate with the Karaf community more effectively we have established a procedure that we hope will help keep users & developers aware of new branches being created, and their status as they go towards a release. Generally these things are discussed on the project IRC channel, however that is not prominent enough to reach the whole community, so we'll now send out update or notice emails to our user/dev lists.

Now that we're moved to a Scalate based web site we now have a new procedure for generating our manual. This new system should help us improve the quality of our documentation by linking the manual to Karaf versions instead of packaging the old wiki's manual pages. Please note that this takes affect for Karaf version 2.2.x and higher.

Well, this is all neat. So let's get to the good part - the next Karaf iteration! Yes, lets move on to karaf 2.1.4 Release Candidate. We began discussing the status of 2.1.4 earlier this week on the dev email list; we have since then reviewed the reported JIRA issues and decided that this may be a good time to cut an RC. Issues that have not been resolved have been moved forward to 2.1.5, so I'll now start the process of updating the release notes for in-kit inclusion. This will be the first release with all the new infrastructure changes, so I'm hoping all will be clear sailing :)