I think a lot of confusion comes from the fact that the 2.x line is
starting to mature. Before this there wasn't such a big contention of
what went into patch vs. minor releases and often the lines were blurred
between the two. However now we have significant customers and products
starting to use 2.x as a base, which means we need to start treating it
like we treat 1.x. That means getting serious about what we should put
into a patch release vs. what we postpone to a minor release.
Here's my $0.02 on recent proposals:
+1 to releasing more often in general. A lot of the rush to put changes
into a patch release is because it can be a very long time between any
kind of release. If minor releases are more frequent then I hope there
would be less of a need to rush something or hold up a release.
+1 to limiting checkins of patch releases to Blockers/Criticals. If
necessary committers check into trunk/branch-2 only and defer to the
patch release manager for the patch release merge. Then there should be
fewer surprises for everyone what ended up in a patch release and less
likely the patch release becomes destabilized from the sheer amount of
code churn. Maybe this won't be necessary if everyone understands that
the patch release isn't the only way to get a change out in timely manner.
As for 2.2.1, again I think it's expectations for what that release
means. If it's really just a patch release then there shouldn't be
features in it and tons of code churn, but I think many were treating it
as the next vehicle to deliver changes in general. If we think 2.2.1 is
just as good or better than 2.2.0 then let's wrap it up and move to a
more disciplined approach for subsequent patch releases and more
frequent minor releases.
Jason
On 11/13/2013 12:10 PM, Arun C Murthy wrote:
On Nov 12, 2013, at 1:54 PM, Todd Lipcon <t...@cloudera.com> wrote:
On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 2:57 PM, Colin McCabe <cmcc...@alumni.cmu.edu>wrote:
To be honest, I'm not aware of anything in 2.2.1 that shouldn't be
there. However, I have only been following the HDFS and common side
of things so I may not have the full picture. Arun, can you give a
specific example of something you'd like to "blow away"?
There are bunch of issues in YARN/MapReduce which clearly aren't *critical*,
similarly in HDFS a cursory glance showed up some *enhancements*/*improvements*
in CHANGES.txt which aren't necessary for a patch release, plus things like:
HADOOP-9623
Update jets3t dependency to 0.9.0
Having said that, the HDFS devs know their code the best.
I agree with Colin. If we've been backporting things into a patch release
(third version component) which don't belong, we should explicitly call out
those patches, so we can learn from our mistakes and have a discussion
about what belongs.
Good point.
Here is a straw man proposal:
----
A patch (third version) release should only include *blocker* bugs which are
critical from an operational, security or data-integrity issues.
This way, we can ensure that a minor series release (2.2.x or 2.3.x or 2.4.x)
is always release-able, and more importantly, deploy-able at any point in time.
----
Sandy did bring up a related point about timing of releases and the urge for
everyone to cram features/fixes into a dot release.
So, we could remedy that situation by doing a release every 4-6 weeks (2.3, 2.4
etc.) and keep the patch releases limited to blocker bugs.
Thoughts?
thanks,
Arun
