It is NOT necessary to run all checks to cast a vote for a release candidate.
However, you should clearly state which checks you did.
The release manager needs to ensure that each following check was done.

Checking Artifacts

Some of these are strictly required for a release to be ASF compliant.


Checking Licenses

These checks are strictly required for a release to be ASF compliant.

Important: These checks must be performed for

  • the Source Release
  • the Binary Release
  • the Maven Artifacts (jar files uploaded to Maven Central)

Checks to be made include

  • All Java artifacts must contain an Apache License file and a NOTICE file. Python artifacts only require an Apache License file.
  • Non-Apache licenses of bundled dependencies must be forwarded
  • The NOTICE files aggregate all copyright notices and list all bundled dependencies (except Apache licensed dependencies) 

A detailed explanation on the steps above is in https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLINK/Licensing (see the bottom of the document for the actions to take)


Testing Functionality

This is not necessarily required for a release to be ASF compliant, but required to ensure a high quality release.

This is not an exhaustive list - it is mainly a suggestion where to start testing.

Built-in tests

Check if the source release is building properly with Maven, including checkstyle and all tests (mvn clean verify)

  • Build for Scala 2.12

Run the scripted nightly tests: https://github.com/apache/flink/tree/master/flink-end-to-end-tests

Run the Jepsen Tests for Flink: https://github.com/apache/flink/tree/master/flink-jepsen

Quickstarts

Verify that the quickstarts for Scala and Java are working with the staging repository for both IntelliJ and Eclipse.

Simple Starter Experience and Use Cases

Run all examples from the IDE (Eclipse & IntelliJ)

Start a local cluster (start-cluster.sh) and verify that the processes come up

  • Examine the *.out files (should be empty) and the log files (should contain no exceptions)
  • Test for Linux, OS X, Windows (for Windows as far as possible, not all scripts exist)
  • Shutdown and verify there are no exceptions in the log output (after shutdown)
  • Check all start+submission scripts for paths with and without spaces (./bin/* scripts are quite fragile for paths with spaces)

Verify that the examples are running from both ./bin/flink and from the web-based job submission tool

  • Start multiple taskmanagers in the local cluster
  • Change the flink-conf.yml to define more than one task slot
  • Run the examples with a parallelism > 1
  • Examine the log output - no error messages should be encountered

Testing Larger Setups

These tests may require access to larger clusters or a public cloud budget. Below are suggestions for common things to test.

A nice program to use for tests is https://github.com/apache/flink/tree/master/flink-end-to-end-tests/flink-datastream-allround-test
It uses built-in data generation and verification and uses some sensitive features.

Test against different file systems (Local/NFS, HDFS, S3, ...)

  • Use file systems for checkpoints
  • Use file systems for input/output

Run examples on different resource infrastructures

  • YARN
  • Mesos
  • Kubernetes

Test against different source and sink systems (Kafka, Kinesis, etc.)

Checking Documentation

  • Check that all links work, the front page is up to date

  • Check that new features are documented and updates to existing features are written down.

  • Ensure that the migration guide from the last release to the new release is available and up to date.

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