Hi devs, It has been more than 15 months since we kicked off the 2.0 release plan[1]. With Flink 1.20 released last week, we finally entered the 2.0 release cycle.
As previously decided, Becket, Jark, Martijn and I will serve as the release managers. We had a brief offline discussion (except for Martijn who's on vacation), and here's the outcome. We are planning to have the *first release sync* at: - 14:00-15:00, Aug 14 (Wed), BJT (GMT+8) - 08:00-09:00, Aug 14 (Wed), CEST (GMT+2) - 23:00-24:00, Aug 13 (Tues), PDT (GMT-7) Everyone is welcome to join the release sync. You can subscribe to the Google Calendar[2] or join the Google Meet[3] directly. You can also find these links on the 2.0 Release wiki page [4]. There are a few things that we'd like to bring up for discussion in this thread. *We'd like to hear your opinions before the release sync*, so that hopefully we can reach consensus on first release sync. Also, please feel free to *raise anything else that you'd like to discuss* in this thread*.* * ## Preview Release* In a previous thread [5], Jark proposed to have a preview release before the formal 2.0 release. The 2.0 release is expected to contain many API breaking changes. Having a preview release would allow people, especially partener projects, to adapt to the new APIs early, and provide feedback for us before we commit to compatibility of these APIs in the formal 2.0 release. The preview release can be lightweight. We don't need to complete all planned features in it, and can focus only on API breaking changes. Ideally, all API breaking changes should be done in the preview release. However, we still allow breaking changes between the preview and formal releases, in order to fix problems found in feedback on the preview release. Most API breaking changes should already have been well planned and partially done in previous release cycles, the remaining tasks are mainly removing deprecated APIs, making them possible to complete relatively soon. Moreover, we don't need to spend a lot of effort on testing and stabilizing the release, because we don't expect people to use it for production. *## Time Plan* If the community agrees to have a preview release, we'd propose to have the following time plan. - Having a preview release at around the end of September. All foreseeable API breaking changes for release 2.0 should be included. There will be no feature freeze, nor comprehensive release testing, for the preview release. - Feature freeze for the formal 2.0 release at around the end of November. This gives us roughly 2 months for collecting feedback from the preview release. - Formal release at around the end of December, or likely January next year. *## Work Items* We have previously collected a list of must-have and nice-to-have work items [4]. Unfortunately, despite being marked as must-have, some work items won't make release 2.0, due to e.g. prior deprecation efforts not completed in previous releases. I think this is because we marked all API breaking changes as must-have, while some of them don't really have high priorities. Meantime, as discussed in [5], we won't block new features not listed in the previous list [4]. We will still collect feature plans for the 2.0 release cycle, as we did for other recent releases. So here's my proposal. - We will have two lists, for breaking changes and non-breaking changes respectively. - For breaking changes, they are expected to be completed in the preview release, at least the breaking part. Exceptions can be made but would require case-by-case discussions with the release managers, similar to making exceptions for feature freeze in previous releases. - For non-breaking changes, we'll apply the same time-based rules just like other minor releases, that only features completed by the feature freeze date will be included. If the community agrees, I can update the wiki page, update the existing lists and start collecting new features for this release cycle. In addition, I'll go through existing work items, check with the contributors and remove those that are no longer available. Looking forward to your feedback. Best, Xintong [1] https://lists.apache.org/thread/b8w5cx0qqbwzzklyn5xxf54vw9ymys1c [2] https://calendar.app.google/YaCmuXHGmUbC7w659 [3] https://meet.google.com/fre-kcvf-mwt [4] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLINK/2.0+Release [5] https://lists.apache.org/thread/rz9n4r8cng8j80hx6zwb19xfjft5t75h
