Hello, I would like to open a discussion about release frequency from lucene/solr's 3x branch. I'm not asking for votes or anything, just ideas.
For Lucene/Solr its been a pretty long time since the users got a feature release. I don't consider Lucene 3.0 as a feature release either. I think now that we have a "trunk" for unstable development, and a "3x" stable branch, that we should think about cutting releases from this branch much more often, for example every month or two. I think that by doing this, we will engage the community more: because many people won't run svn checkouts/snapshots, and many people probably wont even look at unreleased code. In the past it seems releases were fairly infrequent, and I'm not sure I have the background to really understand why, but i have 3 theories: * concerns about the actual code being stable * the release process is too complicated * getting someone to do the work For stability, my argument is that our "3x" stable branch is inherently more stable than previous trunks were, so its safe to release more often from it. I give some very rough, very unscientific numbers below from Lucene's JIRA, but I think the same applies to Solr. Based on the last 4 weeks of development (resolved issues): Of bugfixes, about half (6) are fixes to bugs that already existed in 2.9/3.0 About 25% (3) are fixes to bugs we only introduced in trunk, and do not affect 3x. The other 25% (4) are fixes to things we introduced in trunk/3x You could say this suggests 3x is very roughly "twice" as stable as trunk, yet has about 80% of the new features/improvements (14 out of 17). With regards to the release process: I also think if we decide to do this, we must simplify and automate our release procedures. To be frank, http://wiki.apache.org/lucene-java/ReleaseTodo scares the crap out of me, and something like 'ant release' that someone can run from the top level for both Lucene and Solr would really go a long way towards making the release process less painful. I realize this is difficult and cannot be fully automated but I think it can be improved. Finally, as far as getting someone to do the work, I can certainly volunteer to help in the following ways: * being RM if you are ok with a non-maven release (until LUCENE-2268 is fixed, i am uncomfortable with maven) * improving the build to simplify the release process: (see SOLR-2002 for a start) -- Robert Muir rcm...@gmail.com
