Hey guys, been a while since I sent a message to this list. I have not been following Kafka development closely for the past 9 or so months, but I'm now evaluating upgrading our installation to Kafka 0.8.2 and wanted to share my experiences in attempting to get a handle on that.
First thing I did was check the changelog, easily found here: https://archive.apache.org/dist/kafka/0.8.2.0/RELEASE_NOTES.html I started going through that, clicking on things relevant to my interests as of the last release, assuming anything in that list would be an implemented fix or new feature, but what I found was that many Jiras are misleading either with respect to their fix version, their actual status, or their contents. Examples: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-1000 - fix version is a released version but ticket is still open https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-1784 - has fix version but marked as duplicate of a still open ticket https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-1013 - similarly, marked as fixed in 0.8.2.0 but still open and seemingly not merged into the 0.8.2.0 branch https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-1328 - Including an unimplemented API into a release? All in all, based on these few initial findings, I found myself quickly distrusting the changelog list and the Jiras marked with the 0.8.2.0 tag, so that turned into a very hard time digging through the jiras and git repo to see what actually changed between versions. It seems to me like if a jira is marked as fixed in a released version, then it should actually be fixed in that version, and if not the fixVersion tag should be removed until it is, so it doesn't show up in searches/misleading changelogs. Anyway, just my two cents, thank you for reading. --Ian
