US Holiday on Monday and I took yesterday off - biweekly-ish ;) Apache Cassandra 4.1-alpha1 has been released! https://lists.apache.org/thread/h05t3cqhsdm35v2pttddng6v84s3opxm
The Call for Speakers (CFP) for the Apache Cassandra World Party celebrating the release of 4.1 is live: https://sessionize.com/apache-cassandra-4-1-world-party/. Pulling the text straight from the site: "We encourage contributors, end users and community members to submit fun, fast-paced, 5 minute “lightning” style talks that focus on: * What you love about Cassandra * Why you’re passionate about Cassandra * What you’ve learned using Cassandra * What you’ve built with Cassandra * How you successfully scale applications with Cassandra" So how's 4.1 beta and beyond looking? That depends on which test run you check. :) https://butler.cassandra.apache.org/#/ The butler dashboard has us mostly around 10 test failures with the occasional brief jaunt up to 60+. This is pretty consistent since the freeze in early May, however we've had quite a bit of hygiene clean up that have been surfacing existing failures that had been slipping through the cracks so we're moving in the right direction (i.e. tightening up correctness heading to release) underlying this rather blunt signal. >From a "we don't cut beta until we have 0 test flakes" perspective (which is >the letter of the law here: >(https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CASSANDRA/Release+Lifecycle), we >have our work cut out for us: https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=484&quickFilter=2454 We have 40 tickets blocking the release of 4.1 Beta at this time. We've had 9 close out in the past 2 weeks on 4.1, so we're not quite on track for a July 1st release if we keep to the "0 flakes" metric. Depending on how the next week or two go we should discuss on the dev ML. [New contributor Getting Started] So about those 40 tickets. :) Here's a link for you: https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=484&quickFilter=2454&quickFilter=2160 We have 21 tickets blocking beta that aren't assigned to anyone. Anything that's a failing or flaky test is a great place to start to get to know the code-base a bit. We have a "Getting started" guide on our website that'll help you with setting up your environment here: https://cassandra.apache.org/_/development/index.html, and the dev community hangs out on https://the-asf.slack.com in #cassandra-dev. There's 13 of us that have volunteered to help mentor who you can conveniently reach on slack with the @cassandra_mentors alias in the chat room, or just float any questions you have to the channel at large. Looking forward to connecting! [Dev list Digest] https://lists.apache.org/list?dev@cassandra.apache.org:lte=2w: Discussion on updating our code contribution and style guide is coming to a close here: https://lists.apache.org/thread/l6kdgbyhrsg64025dr9wdysjt4gykv2r. If you have any last minute thoughts now's the time. An RSS feed is in the works for the official website; discussion happening here: https://lists.apache.org/thread/6rk5otkg27hhsfvdl7hp6lr7dg3075n2 A Cassandra marketing meeting happened on the 26th - the email thread about it can be found here https://lists.apache.org/thread/l36y5vz3xf327o45j78g3w4frm8pr02w and the notes from the meeting can be found in this gdoc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11ANJcz1BuXcTPoVZNo4o00SMp6smVzQufvXsrqs0IlE/edit#heading=h.vd4gtjp6aszy. Highlights include discussion about the Cassandra World Party scheduled for July 20th. We've had quite a few blog posts go up for review and hit the blog; check this link for an overview: https://lists.apache.org/list?dev@cassandra.apache.org:lte=1M:For%20Review [CI Trends] https://butler.cassandra.apache.org/#/ Let's check in on non-4.1 branches first since we've been spending a lot of time and energy focused there. For the month of May, we've remained constant with our failure count on 3.11 around 35, 3.0 around 16 trending down, 4.0 pretty spikey but centering around ~8 failures, and trunk looking quite a lot like 4.0 and 4.1 vacillating from a steady state ~ 20 ish failures up to 60 and down to 0 on failed runs. So not surprisingly, the places where the work is happening are seeing the most instability on CI. Interesting that we see that happening on the 4.0 branch however as it's not seeing nearly the same # of commits as, say, 4.1 or trunk. So nothing systemic jumps out over the past month, and given some of the things David and Ekaterina have unearthed the fact that our test failure count hasn't ballooned is a good sign. :) [Release progress] https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=484&quickFilter=2175 4.1 alpha: 5 issues closed out; bugfixes, test fixes, circle config. All the things we'd hope to see in an alpha phase tightening up 4.1 beta: 7 flaky / failing test fixes, and utests_system_keyspace_directory added to the precommit tests. 4.1 rc / ga: Did I mention flaky test failures and fixes? ;) Really solid focus going into the 4.1 release window here and this final stretch in June. I'm looking forward to a retrospective when we hit GA! ~Josh
