Check the release prerequisites before doing anything irreversible

[wu-sheng]

Cutting 0.11.0 stopped immediately:

version: 0.11.0
appVersion: "0.11.0"
On branch 0.11.0-release
nothing to commit, working tree clean

and nothing else happened — no tag, no artifacts, no upload.

The abort

set_release_version ends with a plain git commit, which exits non-zero when nothing is
staged, and the script runs under set -e. Nothing is staged in the ordinary case: the
guide tells you to set Chart.yaml before starting, and the kustomize image tags are set in
that same function specifically so the identical call inside make release is a no-op. The
better prepared the repository, the more certainly the release aborted — with a message that
reads like success.

Both release commits take --allow-empty now. That also closes something quieter: the
regeneration step a few lines down does git commit --amend, and with no commit of its own to
amend it would have rewritten master's HEAD — folding generated files into someone else's
commit and changing the tree the tag was about to point at.

The deeper problem

release.sh checked almost nothing up front. It verified the signing key and the tools, then
went straight on to push a tag — so a prerequisite discovered late is not merely
inconvenient: recovering means deleting a tag from the remote.

tools/releasing/preflight.sh now checks the lot first, and reports every problem rather than
stopping at the first:

=== Release preflight ===

Tools
  ✓ all present: gpg svn shasum git go helm yq gh tar
GPG signing key
  ✓ would sign as wusheng@apache.org (D360AB2A…E06B)
  ✓ that key is in the published KEYS file
GitHub
  ✓ gh is authenticated as wu-sheng
Apache dist (svn)
  ✓ dev/skywalking/swck readable
  ✓ release/skywalking/swck readable (holds: 0.10.0/)
  ! commit access is NOT checked here — release.sh step 7 is the first real test.
Version
  ✓ releasing 0.11.0; previous tag v0.10.0
  ✓ tag v0.11.0 is free
Previous attempts
  ✓ dist/dev is empty
Generated files
  ✓ working tree is clean
  ✓ chart manifests are in sync with the operator sources
Docker Hub
  ! DOCKERHUB_USER / DOCKERHUB_TOKEN cannot be checked from here …

Preflight passed.

release.sh sources it and calls run_preflight as its step 2, so the two cannot drift.

It is deliberately explicit about what it cannot establish from a developer machine, rather
than implying otherwise: svn commit access (testing it means writing to the ASF dist area), the
Docker Hub repository secrets (listing them needs an admin token), and whether the Docker Hub
publish path works at all — it has never run.

Also

tools/releasing/.gitignore, mirroring apache/skywalking's, carrying the licence header this
repository requires on one. release.sh clones into that directory and stages an svn working
copy beside it; both were showing up as untracked in the release manager's checkout.

Verified

Reproduced the abort under set -e (exit 1, the line after the commit never runs) and confirmed
the fix (exit 0, the amend lands on the script's own commit with the base commit still its
parent). Ran preflight.sh against this machine both dirty and clean — it correctly blocked on
an uncommitted tree and passed once committed.

No damage from the aborted run

No v0.11.0 tag locally or on the remote; dist/dev/skywalking/swck is still empty.

[github-actions]

license-eye has totally checked 416 files.

Valid	Invalid	Ignored	Fixed
309	1	106	0

Click to see the invalid file list

• tools/releasing/.gitignore