This is a Spring Data API only dependency. The idea is to have only the classes used by Quarkus (and the transitive dependencies) This absolutely minimum dependencies would be a great benefit to reduce the footprint of Quarkus applications using the spring data modules.
To release a new version, follow these steps:
https://github.com/smallrye/smallrye/wiki/Release-Process#releasing
The staging repository is automatically closed. The sync with Maven Central should take ~30 minutes.