Allen Wittenauer wrote:
My main point was that suddenly people seem to be hot to declare something 1.0. I'm trying to understand why [...]
My rationale for suggesting a release named 1.0 was that I prefer that release numbers say something about compatibility. The compatibility rules we've used for Hadoop (which are not too different that what most would assume about versions) are that pre-1.0 releases may break compatibility with one another, while post-1.0 we'd only try to move folks to new, primary APIs at major releases. Programs written against 1.0 would run against any 1.x release, but may require modifications before they'd run against any 2.x or 3.x release. So a 1.0 release implies that we have APIs that we intend to support for considerably longer than a 0.x release.
It's now been proposed, post-fact, that the "classic" APIs in 0.20 will be supported long-term. So a 1.0 release with these APIs undeprecated, would rationalize our version numbers, as we further refine their eventual replacements, what would become the 2.0 APIs.
We've long-delayed declaring 1.0 because we were afraid to commit to supporting a given API for a longer term. Now folks are willing to make that long-term commitment to an API, yet seem reluctant to call it 1.0.
I suppose there are lots of other things that folks could think that a 1.0 release implies. I've always argued that release numbers should be about compatibility and compatibility only.
Doug
