I think it would be good for Accumulo to adopt a Long Term Support (LTS) type release schedule. It seems to work well for other projects like Ubuntu and now Java is doing the same. We could have 2 branches of LTS versions, similar to what we have now with 1.9 and 2.0. Then set a schedule, say every 6 months or a year, release a minor/major version. For example:
1.9.0 LTS released April 2018 2.0.0 LTS released August 2019 1.10.0 LTS scheduled to release April 2020 2.x.0 LTS scheduled to release August 2021 Bug fixes for the versions can be released as needed. We can even release minor versions, like 2.1.0 just as a tag, and then merge into the main 2.x branch. That way we only ever have to deal with 2 branches. The motivation for this is to not have so much time (and so many changes) between releases like we did for 2.0. This would also help users with scheduling upgrades.
