Hi! There have been recent discussions about how jclouds could encourage contributions. There were opinions to lower the barrier to become a committer (among others), but I'd like to discuss our release cadence, as I'm convinced improving it would directly benefit our community and encourage more active contributions.
Currently it takes ages to release a jclouds version. We want everything to be as good as possible and we set milestones that are often not aligned with the needs of our users. I'd propose to forget about fixed dates or minimum feature sets, and just release when it makes sense. I don't care about having a jclouds 2.0.59. If we can release jclouds as soon as we have merged some patches to a particular provider that fix a funtcional issue, or several minor patches that fix minor internal issues, I'd say we should release. That will, in my opinion, help tremendously in: * Keeping users using the latest version, and upgrading would be easier for them. * They'll be happier since they will be able to fix their issues sooner. * Will encourage contributions. If we merge patches and release soon, contributors will see an immediate result and will be more keen on contributing more patches. * We would minimize things like this: https://issues.sonatype.org/browse/OSSRH-25296 So, I'd reconsider our release cadence and release planning, and release jclouds as soon as someone asks for it and we have a minimum change set that makes sense. I'd love to hear your opinions on this! I.
