The topic of how we handle merging large complex bodies of work came up recently with the CEP-15 merge and JDK17, and we've faced this question in the past as well (CASSANDRA-8099 comes to mind).
The times we've done large bodies of work separately from trunk and then merged them in have their own benefits and costs, and the examples I can think of where we've merged in work to trunk incrementally with something flagged experimental have markedly different cost/benefits. Further, the two approaches have shaped the *way* we approached work quite differently with how we architected and tested things. My current thinking: I'd like to propose we all agree to move to merge work into trunk incrementally if it's either: 1) New JDK support 2) An approved CEP The bar for merging anything into trunk should remain: 1) 2 +1's from committers 2) Green CI (presently circle or ASF, in the future ideally ASF or an ASF analog env) I don't know if this is a generally held opinion and we just haven't discussed it and switched our general behavior yet, or if this is more controversial, so I won't burden this email with enumerating pros and cons of the two approaches until I get a gauge of the community's temperature. So - what do we think?
