Hi all, Hive project has come a long way. With wide-spread adoption also comes expectations. Expectation of being backward compatible and not breaking things. However that doesn't come free of cost and results in lot of legacy code which can't be refactored without fear of breaking things. As a result project has accumulated lot of debt over time. At the same time there are also lot of features which have seen little uptake. We may want to drop some of those.
In order to move forward and shed that debt we may need a major version release which allows us to make backward incompatible changes and drop rarely used features. At the same time there are lots of users which are consuming currently released 2.1 , 2.2 branches and expect them to stay on it for some time. So, I propose that we create branch-2 from current tip and do future 2.x releases from that branch and keep it backward compatible. This will allow devs to land breaking changes on master and pave way to release hive 3.0 in future. Ofcourse, each specific incompatible change and feature drop even on master need to be evaluated on its own merit on corresponding jira. This email is just a solicitation of feedback for creating branch-2 and allowing breaking changes in master. Thoughts? Thanks, Ashutosh
