Welcome to February. An oddly spelled month with a peculiar and inconsistent number of days.
*Releases: * We find ourselves in the somewhat odd place where release votes passed for 3.0, 3.11, and 4.0, however there were insufficient votes on 4.1 and 5.0 to release those branches. Expect more to come on this front. Java driver released 3.12.0 and 3.12.1; check out the user@ announcements here: https://lists.apache.org/thread/pnv3xq1d2sydmxzh128trd797sb4zjc0, https://lists.apache.org/thread/jtgxrx5fhx772lhndvc4d6w3507tff43 *Discussions:* 10 topics on dev@: Link to ponymail: https://lists.apache.org/list.html?dev@cassandra.apache.org - Patrick is shopping around for contributors to another Cassandra Forward virtual event: https://lists.apache.org/thread/0h53v3v5c8t8txfo7th9xnlsffvs67r1. If you have a topic you want to speak about, chime in! - Brandon reached out to clarify the difference between Patch Available and Needs Committer, and Dmitry followed up with some questions around the contribution process and workflow that are perhaps sparsely documented: https://lists.apache.org/thread/ktds22nm1jptrhrfnmm0y2yyg5v22zcq. Great info here for new contributors if you're looking for some insight and clarification; ideally we'll get the results of this discussion into either the wiki or even better, the "how to contribute" on our project website. - The discussion on "5.1 should be 6.0" continues: https://lists.apache.org/thread/6sv3pjp2fdowgs21wjl8mw54q7t2oxgn. I'm planning on forking off another thread to propose some ideas around simplifying our release process. For now, that thread _seems_ to have surfaced a general acceptance of us versioning our next major as 6.0. Barring any last minute protests of course. - The discussion about capabilities and feature advertisement between nodes and cluster-wide consistency on this topic continues in "Capabilities": https://lists.apache.org/thread/0ychf0zwqoys9jbbr0bjchzg5zcts6pg. There's a lot of really good, interesting work going on in that thread; I think the outcome of this discussion and more robust and consistent cluster-wide awareness of what is and is not safe to use would be incredibly valuable to our users (nevermind those of us on the project never having to write a mixed-capability in-jvm cluster dtest again...). Definitely worth a read. - And last but not least, Maxwell Guo has reached out to ask about the status of triggers on the project here: https://lists.apache.org/thread/n5b2pmr0451ho82f3xvgt153yj3d54sx. Triggers, counters, oldschool Secondary Indexes, Materialized Views: all of these features live in a fenced off place where we generally tell people "Don't use these unless you _really_ know what you're doing". There might be a nugget of insight to take from that that would inform our future development path on some of those things. 7 topics on user@ (excluding UNSUBSCRIBE flailing ;) ): Link to ponymail: https://lists.apache.org/list.html?u...@cassandra.apache.org - Sebastian Albrecht had a question around whether requiring forceful nodetool intervention to enable audit logging after enabling the feature was required: https://lists.apache.org/thread/3whc30bqfcr1vgwv73zwlv74l2v3c0gt. I think there's some interesting UX insights we could take away from this discussion broadly, not just for this specific feature. - Tommy Stendahl looks like he's both a) wrestling with java driver changes and schema agreement check changes or regressions, and b) a lack of clarity around whether the java driver mailing list is still a thing or if conversation should come to user@: https://lists.apache.org/thread/w7hg99q0zcp196vvo75r3t6w32j2rjfo. Either way, CASSJAVA-69 was created to track this potential issue: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSJAVA-69 *JIRA:* Closed: 95 since Jan 1: https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?jql=project%20%3D%20cassandra%20and%20resolved%20%3E%20%222025-01-01%22%20and%20resolution%20%3D%20fixed%20order%20by%20resolved%20. That's... a lot of jiras. I'm impressed. I had no idea we had this much movement, even with me staying on top of the JIRA firehose. Created: 108 new issues created since Jan 1, nothing higher than "normal" priority: https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?jql=project%20%3D%20cassandra%20and%20created%20%3E%20%222025-01-01%22%20order%20by%20priority%2C%20created *New Contributors:** * Here's a kanban filter that'll show you some good starter tickets that are currently unclaimed: https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=484&quickFilter=2162&quickFilter=2160&quickFilter=2652. We have 30 todo unassigned starter tickets; any of those that pique your interest are great candidates to pick up as your first work on the project. Join us on the ASF slack: https://the-asf.slack.com, in #cassandra-dev for dev discussion and #cassandra for user discussion. If you need an invite to the slack server, let me know and I'll get you setup. *Needs Committer:* We have 8 tickets that qualify for needing a committer: https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=484&quickFilter=2170. For those that don't know, we require 2 +1 from committers on the project before merge. *Needs Reviewer:* There are a collection of tickets that are all related that could use a reviewer: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-20158: IntervalTree should support copyAndReplace for checkpoint when ranges are unchanged https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-19596: IntervalTree build throughput is low enough to be a bottleneck https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-20159: memtable flush stuck for minutes on slow replaceFlushed view update https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-20164: support copyAndAddIntervals in IntervalTree for faster replaceFlushed View update If you have experience in this area of the codebase and some cycles, knocking out review on the above four would probably be a good effort vs. impact tradeoff. * * I've created a simple JQL filter of tickets that are patch available w/out a reviewer sorted by age: https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?filter=12353799#. There's 97 tickets on this list and the oldest one was last modified in 2019; we should probably start working through this list to see if any of these things need to be rebased and then reviewed or closed out if no longer relevant. If some of the newer ones are in a domain you know and you're a committer, please reach out. *CI:* Butler: https://butler.cassandra.apache.org/#/ The cosmic background radiation of our flaky test failures remains pretty steady. Looks like we're floating around 15 on average on trunk, 5.0 had an uptick to 22 recently but was averaging around 10, and 4.1 looks steady in the low teens. Well within striking distance were we to need to freeze a branch and buckle down to hit green CI for a release. Busy month on tickets in Jan and busy month on dev list discussions; glad to see us starting off the year with a bang. Until next month. ~Josh
