Hi Folks! We had a discussion with a few people about the versioning of Impala after 3.0. The motivation was that IMPALA-3307 (which replaces the timezone implementation in Impala, and contains some breaking changes) missed 3.0 and we are not sure about the version in which it can be released - is it 3.1 or 4.0?
A. jumping to 4.0 would communicate clearly that the release contains braking changes - if the plan for Impala is to follow semantic versioning, than this is the way to go B. releasing it in 3.1 would communicate that the change is too small for a major version bump, and major versions are kept for BIG changes in Impala My personal preference is for B - if a breaking change is relatively small and workarounds are possible + the community agrees, then it should be possible to release it in minor a version, while major versions could be kept for changes where switching Impala version needs large effort on the user's side (for example 2->3 jump needs new Java and Hadoop major version), or when a huge improvement is added to Impala which deserves extra attention. This is more of an aesthetic than a rational choice on my side, so I am totally ok with semantic versioning too, if the community prefers it.
