In the past the Spark community have created preview packages (not official releases) and used those as opportunities to ask community members to test the upcoming versions of Apache Spark. Several people in the Apache community have suggested we conduct votes for these preview packages and turn them into formal releases by the Apache foundation's standard. This is a result of that.
Note that this preview release should contain almost all the new features that will be in Apache Spark 2.0.0. However, it is not meant to be functional, i.e. the preview release contain critical bugs and documentation errors. To download, please see the bottom of this web page: http://spark.apache.org/downloads.html For the list of known issues, please see https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-15520?jql=project%20%3D%20SPARK%20AND%20status%20in%20(Open%2C%20%22In%20Progress%22%2C%20Reopened)%20AND%20%22Target%20Version%2Fs%22%20%3D%202.0.0 Note 1: The current download link goes directly to dist.apache.org. Once all the files are propagated to all mirrors, I will update the link to link to the mirror selector instead. Note 2: This is the first time we are publishing official, voted preview releases. Would love to hear feedback.
