I wanted to open up a discussion about optionality of a few tickets for 4.0. The three I'm specifically thinking of here are: 1) CASSANDRA-15146: Transition TLS server configuration options are overly complex 2) CASSANDRA-14825: Expose table schema for drivers 3) CASSANDRA-15299: CASSANDRA-13304 follow-up: improve checksumming and compression in protocol v5-beta
I am *personally* of the opinion that each of these three should be considered optional for 4.0 and not blockers to cut beta. My reasoning: 1) it's been 4 years, 7 months, 11 days since the release of 3.0.0 2) Alternatively, it's been 3 years, 4 months, 13 days since the release of 3.10.0 (the last time we added new features to the DB) 3) 2 of the 3 tickets involve non-trivial changes to the drivers. The top 5 drivers alone see tens of thousands of aggregate downloads a day; getting all 5 of those in parity w/the new featureset and to be tested during the GA phase is going to be very difficult with driver impacting, significant protocol changes this late in the alpha cycle (this would argue for them being pushed to 4.1; including here just to point out the ambivalent PoV here) 4) If we plan on releasing 4.1 six months after the release of 4.0 (i.e. calender scope vs. feature scope - not yet agreed upon but an option), we would be looking at a relatively trivial delay of the addition of "nice-to-have" features relative to broader infrastructure adoption cycles. I know this is a controversial topic, and I've spoken with many of you that are working on or reviewing the above tickets - your points of view and arguments in favor of keeping them in 4.0 definitely resonate with me. That said, trying to put myself in the shoes of an end user that hasn't seen a material functionality upgrade in 3+ years and could be testing out and using zero-copy streaming, audit logging, the new messaging service code, and the hundreds of bugfixes and almost 300 improvements already in 4.0 - I think the value in getting this release in my hands would outweigh the value in getting these three particular features in 4.0 vs. 4.1. Also, to reiterate, I would personally advocate for these three tickets being *optional*, meaning if we merge the 1 awaiting review and 5 in review, then we push them to 4.1. So - what does everyone else think? ~Josh
