Hey Solr Devs,
So, 1.3.0 is out. Whew! I think I survived. I hope y'all did too.
At any rate, I promised Lars I would follow up on his comment: http://lucene.markmail.org/message/ynsnkigymbv7kfqn?q=%5BVOTE%5D+Solr+1%2E3
, so here goes.
So, what are the lessons learned? What can we do to improve Solr's
process, if any?
I saw a few pain points that I think are easily addressed:
1. IMO, way too long between release of 1.2 and 1.3 (1 year, 3
months). Yes, releases cause everyone to pause and take stock, but
they are worthwhile, and not just technically. Many users only use
releases. Many people don't notice a project except when they see it
via some PR. Releasing more often can help attract more contributors/
users which should lead to a better Solr. Additionally, I imagine
some people upgrading from 1.2 to 1.3 are trying to swallow a pretty
big pill of features. Granted, things should be back-compat, but even
that is hard to track when something is a 1+ year ago. I'd suggest we
shoot for every 6 mos. or so, and maybe even some bug fix releases
more often.
2. Last minute changes. The mutlicore changes 1 week before release
were pretty tough to swallow. Great job to those involved who took it
on, but still, let's not do that again, eh? One _suggestion_ is that
we try to front-load big features. Hard to do, but maybe the other
approach is that if we are about to take on a big new feature, we
consider what other big new features are already in Solr and then
maybe consider publishing them first and holding off for the next
version the new feature. Another possibility on this is a slight
relaxation in back-compatibility "policy" in that for big features, we
reserve the right to alter them in a build version release. The main
thing that this addresses is a lot of people feel uncomfortable on
trunk, so maybe it's a way of getting more eyeballs. Of course, we do
this already to some extent when we mark things as experimental, so
maybe nothing to change here. Just thinking out loud.
3. We need to keep better track of NOTICEs, headers and library
stuff. Yonik and others did a lot to get these up to date again. I
know I'm especially guilty of forgetting to put headers on. You can
now run ant rat-sources for help in identifying offending files.
Thoughts? Any thing else to consider?
-Grant
