Hi Shai,
I am fine with that, we can still support 3.y [y means the version that was at this point released] after a release of 4.0 but no new features or non-bug-fixes. This means a change like the index format change would not be allowed for 3.y after 4.0 was released. So +1 for this strategy! Uwe ----- Uwe Schindler H.-H.-Meier-Allee 63, D-28213 Bremen http://www.thetaphi.de <http://www.thetaphi.de/> eMail: u...@thetaphi.de From: Shai Erera [mailto:ser...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, January 24, 2011 10:08 AM To: dev@lucene.apache.org Subject: [DISCUSSION] Trunk and Stable release strategy Hi Few days ago Robert and I discussed this matter over IRC and thought it's something we should bring forward to the list. This issue arise due to recent index format change introduced in LUCENE-2720, and the interesting question was "if we say 4.0 is required to read all 3x indexes, how would 4.0 support a future version of 3x, that did not even exist when 4.0 was released". Trunk means the 'unstable' branch (today's 4.0) and Stable is today's 3.0, but the same issue will arise after we make 4.0 Stable and 5.0 Trunk. After some discussion we came to a solution that we would like to propose to the list: we continue to release 3x until we stabilize trunk. When we're happy with trunk, we release it, say 4.0, and the last 3x release becomes the bug fix release for 3x and from that point we maintain 4.0 (new features and all, while maintaining API back-compat) and Trunk becomes the next big thing (5.0). There won't be interleaving 4.0 and 3x releases and we won't reach the situation where we released 4.0 and then release 3.2, w/ say index format change (that we just had to make). While we can say 3x can be released after 4.0 w/ no index format changes whatsoever, we think this proposal makes sense. There's no point maintaining 2 stable branches (3x and 4x) and an unstable Trunk. This will allow us to release 3x as frequent as we want, hold on w/ trunk as much as we want, and at some point cut over to 4.0 and think about the next big things we'd like to bring to Lucene. What do you think? Shai
