Stack wrote:
Getting a release out is critical. Otherwise, IMO, the project is
dead but for the stiffening.
Thanks Tom for stepping up to play the RM role for a 0.21.
Regarding Steve's call for what we can offer Tom to help along the
release, the little flea hbase can test its use case on 0.21.0
candidates and we can probably take on a few of the HDFS blockers. I
also like Steve's suggestion of a council to figure what makes the
0.21 cut (We're talking security and avro in 0.22, not 0.21 right?).
Allen in his note raises another issue beyond the release blockage
that I believe warrants further discussion. The "forks" maintained by
the big contributors currently cloud (undermine?) the Apache release
and the amount and pain involved patch wrangling is a friction on
forward progress especially as versions deviate further. Perhaps this
state is inevitable when the stakes are this high, where there are new
releases rolled out across thousands of machines carrying biz-critical
data that cannot fail. Having the Apache project release reliably on
a schedule should help especially if posted fixes get reviewed and
committed. Formally adopting the stable/unstable labeling could help
too.
The ASF never mandates a release schedule; can be too hard to meet. The
main thing is "making progress" and having some plan to release updated
versions. But if you don't have frequent releases, the pressure to
backport increases.
-steve
