I like this. There's a few things marked as experimental today, so I'll take a stab at making this more concrete, and I think we should be open to graduating certain things out of beta to GA at a faster cycle than a major release.
Java versions, for example, should really move out of "beta" quickly. We test against it, and we're not going to drop new versions. So if we're looking at C* 5.0, we should move Java 17 out of experimental / beta immediately and call it GA. SAI and UCS should probably graduate no later than 5.1. On the other hand, MVs have enough warts I actively recommend against using them and should be in beta till we can actually repair them. I don't know if anyone's actually used transient replication and if it's even beta quality... that might actually warrant being called experimental still. 'ALTER ... DROP COMPACT STORAGE' is flagged as experimental. I'm not sure what to do with this. I advise people migrate their data for any Thrift -> CQL cases, mostly because the edge cases are so hard to know in advance, especially since by now these codebases are ancient and the original developers are long gone. Thoughts? Jon On Mon, Dec 9, 2024 at 6:28 AM Josh McKenzie <jmcken...@apache.org> wrote: > Jon stated: > > Side note: I think experimental has been over-used and has lost all > meaning. How is Java 17 experimental? Very confusing for the community. > > > Dinesh followed with: > > Philosophically, as a project, we should wait until critical features like > these reach a certain level of maturity prior to recommending it as a > default. For me maturity is a function of adoption by diverse use-cases in > production and scale. > > > I'd like to discuss 2 ideas related to the above: > > 1. We rename / alias "experimental" to "beta". It's a word that's > ubiquitous in our field and communicates the correct level of expectation > to our users (API stable, may have bugs) > 2. *All new features* go through one major (either semver MAJOR or > MINOR) as "beta" > > > To Jon's point, "experimental" was really a kludge to work around > Materialized Views having some very sharp edges that users had to be very > aware of. We haven't really used the flagging much (at all?) since then, > and we don't have a formalized way to shepherd a new feature through a > "soak" period where it can "reach a certain level of maturity". We're > caught in a chicken-or-egg scenario with our current need to get a feature > released more broadly to have confidence in its stability (to Dinesh's > point). > > In my mind, the following feature evolution would be healthy for us and > good for our users: > > 1. Beta > 2. Generally Available > 3. Default (where appropriate) > > To graduate from Beta -> GA, good UX, user facing documentation, a > [DISCUSS] thread where we have a clear consensus of readiness, all seem > like healthy and good steps. From GA -> Default, [DISCUSS] like we're > having re: compaction strategies, unearthing shortcomings, edge-cases, > documentation needs, etc. > > Curious what others think. > > ~Josh >
