Hi all, Following the release schedule as outlined in the wiki, I just created branch-2.1 to form the basis of the 2.1 release. As of today we have less than 50 open issues for 2.1.0. The next couple of weeks we as a community should focus on testing and bug fixes and burn down the number of outstanding tickets to 0. My general feeling looking at the last 3 months of development is that this release as a whole focuses more than the past on stability, bug fixes and internal refactoring (for cleaning up some of the debts accumulated during 2.0 development).
What does this mean for committers? 1. For patches that should go into Spark 2.1.0, make sure you also merge them into not just master, but also branch-2.1. 2. Switch the focus from new feature development to bug fixes and documentation. For "new features" that already have high quality, outstanding pull requests, shepard them in in the next couple of days. 3. Please un-target or re-target issues if they don't make sense for 2.1. If a ticket is not "bug fix" and still has no high quality patch, it should probably be retargeted to 2.2. 4. If possible, reach out to users and start testing branch-2.1 to find bugs. The more testing we can do on real workloads before the release, the less bugs we will find in the actual Spark 2.1 release.
