We've had a number of issues recently related to dependencies on old versions of various packages/libraries such as Hadoop itself, Google guava, HTTPClient, mbassador, etc.
How about we create a "bleeding-edge" branch in both Core and Malhar which will use the latest versions of these various dependencies, upgrade to Java 8 so we can use the new Java features, etc. ? This will give us an opportunity to discover these sorts of problems early and, when we are ready to pull the trigger for a major version, we have a branch ready for merge with, hopefully, minimal additional effort. There will be no guarantees w.r.t. this branch so people using it use it at their own risk. Ram
