Build Release Candidate: 1.19.0-rc1

The core of the release process is the build-vote-fix cycle. Each cycle produces one release candidate. The Release Manager repeats this cycle until the community approves one release candidate, which is then finalized.

Prerequisites

Set up a few environment variables to simplify Maven commands that follow. This identifies the release candidate being built. Start with RC_NUM equal to 1 and increment it for each candidate:

RC_NUM="1"
TAG="release-${RELEASE_VERSION}-rc${RC_NUM}"