Hi all, The current master has many critical bug fixes as well as important performance improvements that are not backported (and most likely never will) to the maintenance branches.
Backporting changes from master usually requires adapting the code and tests in questions making it a non-trivial and time consuming task. The ASF bylaws require PMCs to deliver high quality software which satisfy certain criteria. Cutting new releases from maintenance branches with known critical bugs is not compliant with the ASF. CI is unstable in all maintenance branches making the quality of a release questionable and merging new PRs rather difficult. Enabling and running it frequently in all maintenance branches would require a big amount of resources on top of what we already need for master. History has shown that it is very difficult or impossible to properly maintain multiple release branches for Hive. I think it would be to the best interest of the project if the PMC decided to drop support for maintenance branches and focused on releasing exclusively from master. This mail is related to the discussion about the release cadence [1] since it would certainly help making Hive releases more regular. I decided to start a separate thread to avoid mixing multiple topics together. Looking forward for your thoughts. Best, Stamatis [1] https://lists.apache.org/thread/n245dd23kb2v3qrrfp280w3pto89khxj
