Redirect to GitHub releases in NEWS.md

[terrytangyuan]

No description provided.

[codecov-io]

Codecov Report

Merging #6823 (329f1e2) into master (aa0d8f2) will not change coverage.
The diff coverage is n/a.

@@           Coverage Diff           @@
##           master    #6823   +/-   ##
=======================================
  Coverage   81.94%   81.94%           
=======================================
  Files          13       13           
  Lines        3889     3889           
=======================================
  Hits         3187     3187           
  Misses        702      702           

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[hcho3]

The current practice is that a maintainer writes up a release note draft in NEWS.md and others review the pull request. How should the review occur if NEWS.md is deprecated?

[terrytangyuan]

Okay I didn't realize that we relied on this for reviewing releases. It looks like we didn't update this file for the past couple of releases.

Regarding the release review process, perhaps we can do release discussion (with community) and voting (among committers/PMCs) on a GitHub issue or email similar to other Apache projects?

[hcho3]

It looks like we didn't update this file for the past couple of releases.

We only updated it for major releases. The patch releases didn't make it there.

Regarding the release review process, perhaps we can do release discussion (with community) and voting (among committers/PMCs) on a GitHub issue or email similar to other Apache projects?

We already offer 2-week period for users to try out the release candidate, e.g. #6793. (This issue is pinned in the Issues page.)

We use NEWS.md for reviewing the content of the release note, not the release itself. The RC post takes care of the reviewing of the release.

[terrytangyuan]

Sounds good. We should probably document the release process somewhere. I'll close this PR for now as it's no longer needed.