Release & PMC Reality

This section takes you inside the committer and PMC view of Apache Tez. It is written for two audiences:

Contributors who want to understand what a committer is reading when they review your patch, why a release vote takes 72 hours, and what a PMC member actually does between commits.
New committers and PMC members on Tez (or any other ASF project) who need the operational playbook nobody hands them.

The chapters are deliberately not aspirational. They are the mechanics — what email to send, what file to sign, what the [VOTE] thread template looks like, where the LICENSE and NOTICE rules are bright lines.

Reading Order

#	Chapter	Audience
1	Mailing Lists	Everyone
2	JIRA & Code Review	Contributors and committers
3	Committer Mindset	New committers, contributors who want to think like one
4	Release Voting	PMC and release managers
5	PMC Responsibilities	PMC members
6	Licensing	Everyone touching dependencies; PMC for releases
7	Code Style & Trust	All contributors

Chapters 1–3 and 6–7 are useful to contributors. Chapters 4–5 are PMC-facing but worth reading earlier to understand why committers behave the way they do at release time.

How This Section Differs From the Mindset Section

The Contributor Mindset section answered the question "how do I behave so my work gets accepted?" This section answers "what is the work being done by the people who accept it?" — the asymmetric view from the other side.

You don't need to be a committer to read this material. You need to internalise it before you become one, so the offer doesn't catch you off guard.

What This Section Is Not

This section is not:

A substitute for the ASF release distribution policy.
A substitute for ASF legal guidance on licensing.
A substitute for the Tez committer's onboarding email from the PMC.

It is a faithful, project-specific summary of what those documents and that onboarding actually contain, written so that a contributor can build accurate expectations and a new committer can move fast without surprises.

Prerequisites

Before this section is fully useful:

You have read the Contributor Mindset section.
You have a JIRA account at https://issues.apache.org/jira/.
You are subscribed to dev@tez.apache.org.
You have a local clone of Tez at ~/tez-src.

If you are a new Tez committer:

You have received your ASF ID (<id>@apache.org).
You have set up GPG (we'll cover this in Release Voting).
You are subscribed to private@tez.apache.org.

Validation for the Section

You have absorbed this section when you can:

Compose a [VOTE] thread email for an RC without consulting a template.
Read a LICENSE change in a patch and predict if it would block a release.
Explain why Tez is RTC (Review Then Commit) and not CTR (Commit Then Review).
Predict, before opening a JIRA, which committer will likely shepherd it.
Identify the category-A / category-B / category-X status of a dependency you want to add.
Run mvn apache-rat:check and read its output.

The next chapter — Mailing Lists — covers the operational mechanics of the ASF list system that this entire section relies on.