Ah, I might have gotten this wrong. I was indeed under the impression that the staging-settings.xml file would also be used for actually doing the release (I also updated https://community.jboss.org/wiki/ReleasingHibernateValidator/ accordingly), but as you say the wiki page describes the staging repo as only to be used during the verifaction of the staged artifact.

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

I guess we could add a fully automated step where we try to compile something using only the staging settings as discussed on the wiki page, but I am not sure that is necessary.

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.