It's a very painful process to get set up - no doubt it's easy after the first time. I've ultimately found it easier to go via bintray: http://blog.bintray.com/2014/02/11/bintray-as-pain-free-gate... .

On the positive side, some of the complexity comes through enforcing some standards about what packages go into central - in particular you must have a properly declared license, developer contact information, and GPG sign your releases. Which are things other language ecosystems would do well to enforce.