I’m in favor of this idea for all of the reasons Josh mentioned and I’m happy to help out with the curation and maintenance. Consolidating these efforts seems like a clear win to anyone who is already managing their own fork of backports.
A couple of questions that come to mind: 1) What is the inclusion criteria for a patch to get backported? 2) What does the lifecycle of this branch look like? If we use the example of a cassandra-5.1 branch, what happens to this branch after 6.0 is GA? I think there should be some grace period after the next version is cut where this branch is still active, but we probably don't need as long of a support model as the "main" (i.e. 4.0, 4.1, 5.0, 6.0) releases. On Mon, Oct 6, 2025 at 1:39 PM Rahul Singh (ANANT) <[email protected]> wrote: > Makes sense. Does this become "LTS" ? or is this something else. > > > On Mon, Oct 06, 2025 at 04:03 PM Josh McKenzie wrote: > >> On Mon, Oct 06, 2025 at 04:03 PM Josh McKenzie wrote: >> Many large‑scale Cassandra users have had to maintain private feature >> back-port forks (e.g., CEP‑37, compaction optimization, etc) for years on >> older branches. That duplication adds risk and pulls time away from >> upstream contributions which came up as a pain point in discussion at CoC >> this year. >> The proposal we came up with: an official, community‑maintained backport >> branch (e.g. cassandra‑5.1) built on the current GA release that we pilot >> for a year and then decide if we want to make it official. The branch would >> selectively accept non‑disruptive improvements that meet criteria we define >> together. There’s a lot of OSS prior art here (Lucene, httpd, Hadoop, >> Kafka, Linux kernel, etc). >> Benefits include reduced duplicated effort, a safer middle ground between >> trunk and frozen GA releases, faster delivery of vetted features, and >> community energy going to this branch instead of duplicated on private >> forks. >> If you’re interested in helping curate or maintain this branch - or have >> thoughts on the idea - please reply and voice your thoughts. >> ~Josh >> > > >
