So for doing the release, the settings.xml should basically be our example-settings.xml, using a clean local repo.

Right

When doing the last release, I ran a quick "hello world" example using the staged artifacts. I think it's not bad to have this as basic check that the deployed artifact is not corrupt etc.

Personally from a verification/scripting point of view I would just try to access the artifacts (eg via wget) to see that they are there. No need for more imo.

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