This is a great discussion to have. Thank you for raising it. We actually used to do fewer major releases and more minor releases (which was done by backporting API compatible changes to an active_release branch). However this took significant maintainer time (mostly my own, as I recall), though it was fairly mechanical.
About 6 months ago, we had a discussion [1] where I believe the consensus of those who weighed in was for more frequent major releases to free up maintainer time. As our community has grown and we have more people volunteering, it is a good time to revisit this discussion and decide if it is time to change again. Perhaps you could open an issue or discussion in the arrow-rs repository and we could discuss the merits there? Andrew [1]: https://github.com/apache/arrow-rs/issues/1120 On Thu, Sep 8, 2022 at 8:40 AM Ian Joiner <iajoiner...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > Currently we have 2 major releases for arrow-rs and arrow-datafusion per > month. What then happens is that API breaking changes in Arrow will > necessarily require Datafusion to be modified ASAP for compatibility. Then > the changes in Datafusion will necessarily require Ballista to be modified. > I wonder whether we can start doing minor and maybe patch releases and only > release API breaking changes at a lower frequency so that compatibility > updates become less frequent. > > Thanks, > Ian >
