As 0.8 approaches final status in the next few weeks, I wondered about how releases receive the label, "current stable". I don't know if there's any precedent for this, but I thought it might be nice to do a separate vote when new major releases are out and weigh heavily those in the community that can test the release against their use cases and perhaps client developers (probably a subset of the former). So for example, 0.8 comes out and it is not labeled current stable until a separate vote has been taken and it can be verified by a good portion of those doing testing against it that it is in fact stable.
I know that changes were put into place to get releases out faster, but I think this change would be good so that "current stable" can have much more meaning to people. It's hard enough to pick up a new technology that has a high learning curve without having to do testing on what is supposed to be stable. Along with this, is it possible to separate out the releases in the apache debian repo as David Strauss suggested so that we can have a stable line and other labels for lines? Anyway, just wanted to propose something be done so that there could be more credibility could be attached to current stable, and hopefully cassandra as a whole could gain a more positive reputation for being stable as a result (especially among new adopters).
