The intent of the proposed release off the branch-0.20-append was never to derail, “hurt”, or distract from the Hadoop 0.22 effort. The HBase crew are up for helping out testing and debugging and the intent is to run atop the 0.22 version of append as well as 0.20’s append. A release off the branch-0.20-append branch was more about a ‘stop-gap’, see Todd’s explication above, or a ‘fig-leaf’ as Andrew describes it while 0.22 is stabilizing.
Suggestions that projects like HBase hibernate until 0.22 don’t help (See Ryan’s comments for a sense of why). We can just keep on with what we’ve been doing up to this if the feeling is that an append release could somehow jeopardize the 0.22 effort. Its kinda hokey having to point users at some random looking branch [1] telling them build their own but thankfully this is not their only option. I’ve enjoyed the healthy back and forth, St.Ack 1. To be clear, 'random looking branch' is fruit of a bunch of hardwork by Facebookers and Clouderians.
