Hi Mickael,
TL;DR - the most time is spent dealing with projects that themselves are under resourced and no longer participating with the same enthusiasm they once were! This applies to the whole simrel + epp.
For the 2020-12 release cycle, the biggest single use of my time (by far!) was trying to fix the JAXB issue that caused problems when different sets of plug-ins were installed. The conclusion of this seems to be that Mylyn (not wikitext) is just going to be dropped from simrel, and therefore all the packages. It took me days (5+) to resolve and test this issue and continued right through RC2 as the final (known) problem was discovered in RC1.
The thing about the above problem is that builds have always been green, despite there being problems since 2020-06 release. The first step on my release process is "Ensure that the CI build is green. Resolving non-green builds will require tracking down problems and incompatibilities across all Eclipse participating projects. cross-project-issues-dev mailing list is a good place to start when tracking such problems." This basically means that someone (me for now) has to own making sure that the packages build.
The other areas where the time spent does not seem to match the value:
- Updating the N&N links in the epp.website.xml files. This activity ends up serving two functions, first is I collect all the relevant N&N links into epp.website.xml, but secondly I end up reviewing the state of simrel. There are currently 18 unique N&N links, but I had to send emails out to 4 of the projects because their N&N links were somehow broken (e.g. simply 404, or fully missing PMI entry). This is improved in one of two ways - 1. all projects have a generic N&N entry, like wwd[1] or 2. use the Eclipse web API to automate this step[2], but that would require projects to still have up to date N&N links.
- The build itself takes a long time. In particular the promotion job. While I can theoretically press run and then come back to it, it is annoying that the promotion job spends 20 minutes downloading the artifacts from the build being promoted, does some massaging on them, and then spends another 20 minutes copying the results to
download.eclipse.org. (I also imagine that every EPP Thursday the webmasters are cursing the network spike - but maybe it doesn't register?).
Most of the rest of the release process is fairly straightforward and hardly seems worth automating. It of course could be, but there are diminishing returns. (e.g. updating the M1 -> M2 in all the strings could be automated, but it only takes a minute or two to do)
I hope that answers your question.
Jonah
