While HIBERNATE-81 and publishing / github actions are being debugged the release task only stages into the maven central portal requiring a manual release step.

Once this process has been confirmed working, this can be automated by changing the release process in publish.sh:

From:

if [ "$RELEASE" == "true" ]; then
  TASK="publishArchives closeSonatypeStagingRepository"

To:

if [ "$RELEASE" == "true" ]; then
  TASK="publishArchives closeAndReleaseSonatypeStagingRepository"

Addressing the source code notes tagged with TODO-HIBERNATE-128 is in scope of this ticket.