Hi all, First thanks everyone who contributed to 4.5.0 in the past year, and especially thanks JV for spending time doing the release. The first release candidate of 4.5.0 is finally out of review now. We are almost there.
We eventually merge the major features from 3 main folked branches (Salesforce, Twitter and Yahoo), so that we can converge to one main open source branch across different organizations. We added a lot of features, bug fixes and improvements. We moved to github to make contribution easier and friendly and we have new website with more documentation. There are tons of works we did very well in 4.5.0. However, I think the release has taken too long to complete. It causes a lot of inconsistencies between code, configuration and documentation. This causes most of the contributions were spent on improving documentation at the end of the release. And also people can't really follow what's happening in a long-cycle release and they eventually left. I am thinking of changing the release plan/schedule to a more time-based mechanism what other projects (like Kafka, Flink) are doing: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/Time+Based+Release+Plan Some of the benefits are documented in their wikis (also copied them in the email for easy to read). Any thoughts? Shall we try to adopt this method? 1. A quicker feedback cycle and users can benefit from features shipped quicker 2. Predictability for contributors and users: 1. Developers and reviewers can decide in advance what release they are aiming for with specific features. 2. If a feature misses a release we have a good idea of when it will show up. 3. Users know when to expect their features 3. Transparency - There will be a published cut-off date (AKA feature freeze) for the release and people will know about it in advance. Hopefully this will remove the contention around which features make it. 4. Quality - we've seen issues pop up in release candidates due to last-minute features that didn't have proper time to bake in. More time between feature freeze and release will let us test more, document more and resolve more issues. - Sijie
