Thanks David for spotting this will raise RC4 with a fix
> On 2 Oct 2026, at 09:56, David Jacot <david.jacot@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Omnia,
>
> Thanks again for running the release.
>
> While verifying RC3, I found an issue with the signatures of the Maven
> artifacts. The source and binary artifacts are fine, as Bill reported,
> but most of the Maven artifacts cannot be verified with gpg. Here is how
> to reproduce it.
>
> Setup:
>
> curl -sO https://downloads.apache.org/kafka/KEYS
> gpg --import KEYS
> D=https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/kafka/4.4.0-rc3
> M=https://repository.apache.org/content/groups/staging/org/apache/kafka
>
> 1) Binary tarball (dist): OK
>
> curl -sO $D/kafka_2.13-4.4.0.tgz
> curl -sO $D/kafka_2.13-4.4.0.tgz.asc
> gpg --verify kafka_2.13-4.4.0.tgz.asc kafka_2.13-4.4.0.tgz
>
> gpg: Signature made Tue Sep 29 14:24:00 2026 CEST
> gpg...