Hi all, With 0.11.0.0 out of the way, I would like to volunteer to be the release manager for our next time-based feature release. See https://cwiki.apache.org/ confluence/display/KAFKA/Time+Based+Release+Plan if you missed previous communication on time-based releases or need a reminder.
I put together a draft release plan with October 2017 as the release month (as previously agreed) and a list of KIPs that have already been voted: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/Release+Plan+2017.Oct As of today we already have 10 KIPs voted, including 2 merged and 3 with PRs under review. As we start the process more KIPs are expected to be added until the KIP freeze date. In addition to the current release plan, I would also like to propose to set the release version to 1.0.0. More specifically, we will bump up the major version from 0.11 to 1.0, and change the semantics of release digits as: major.minor.bugfix[.release-candidate] To be better aligned with software versioning (https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Software_versioning). Moving forward we can use three digits instead of four in most places that do not require to indicate the rc number. Here is my motivation: 1) Kafka has significantly evolved from its first Apache release of 0.7.0 (incubating) as a pub-sub messaging system into a distributed streaming platform that can enable publish / store / process real-time data streams, with the addition of replication (0.8.0), quota / security support for multi-tenancy (0.8.2, 0.9.0), Connect and Streams API (0.9.0, 0.10.0), and most recently the exactly-once support to have the desired semantics (0.11.0); I think now is a good time to mark the release as a major milestone in the evolution of Apache Kafka. 2) Some people believe 0.x means that the software is immature or not stable, or the public APIs may subject to change incompatibly regardless the fact that Kafka has been widely adopted in productions and the community has made a great effort on maintaining backward compatibility. Making Kafka 1.x will help with promoting the project for that perception. 3) Having three digits as of "major.minor.bugfix" is more natural from a software version understanding pov and aligned with other open source projects as well. How do people feel about 1.0.0.x as the next Kafka version? Please share your thoughts. -- Guozhang
