http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@cassandra.apache.org/msg01549.html
I read it but things are different now because magic 1.0 is out. If you implement 1.0 and put it into production, you really do not want to retest app on new version every 4 months and its unlikely that you will get migration approved by management unless you present clear benefits for such migration. Compression was nice new feature of 1.0 but it was rejected by lot of IT managers as "too risky" for now.
While you can test application quite easily, testing cluster stability is way harder in test environment because its not usually possible to fully replicate workload and data volume in test environment and migration back is difficult because Cassandra currently does not have tool for fast sstable downgrade (1.0 -> 0.8).
For production use long time between major releases is better. I would double time between major releases, maybe not for 1.1/1.2 but later for sure. Take look at postgresql project, they release 1 major version per year and they support 4 major versions for bugfixes and older postgresql versions are still common in production.
Did you asked people running mission critical workloads about their opinion? Another possibility is to use ISV like Datastax to provide long term support.
