Hi,

On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 12:11 PM Ryan Skraba <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hello!
>
> There's been some discussion on JIRA/Github about how we version and
> release Avro.   I wanted to keep this separate from the 1.11.0
> proposal, and collect some resources from the discussions we've had in
> the past [1][2][3].
>
> Right now, there's a request to backport a performance regression to a
> minor release 1.10.3[4].  We've set our sights on the next major
> release 1.11.0.  I don't think we have an official policy on how many
> major releases we plan on supporting, but I don't think we've ever
> released a minor version once a new major version is on the horizon.
>
> Currently, it's a pretty large task to prepare a new major release,
>

By "major" you mean 1.11.0, right ? I.e. we don't talk about SemVer major
here, i.e. 2.0.0


> and it's always been a bit of pain doing a minor release because we
> haven't been rigorous in backporting bug fixes to maintenance, and it
> isn't always very clear which fixes should and shouldn't be applied!
>
> I'd like to collect some opinions about what we should be doing, and
> what we can do in the near term to make this clear and easy for
> maintainers and users.  The immediate question for me: how many major
> versions should we be supporting, and how can we better communicate
> officially this to the community?
>

Since there are not many active maintainers I'd say at most two versions:
- the new major, e.g. 1.11.0
- a patch version for regressions, e.g. 1.10.3
This would mean that once 1.11.0 is released any users of 1.9.x and older
won't get any updates.
The next release could be 1.11.1+1.10.4 or 1.12.0+1.11.1. Depends on how
many regressions have been found in 1.11.0.


Which fixes to backport to the patch version ? I see these options:
1) all bug fixes
2) only the bug fixes requested by the reporter or other users

Another question: When making a release for a patch version, like 1.10.3,
you'd release all langs or just the ones having any backports ? I guess the
latter because it would reduce the work to cut a release

Regards,
Martin


> All my best, Ryan
>
> [1]: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-2687 "Semantic versioning"
> [2]:
> https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/16b68748464a7ce7232f12bbbf781cbfd5de982785d5648b6c564cc9%40%3Cdev.avro.apache.org%3E
> "[DISCUSS] version numbers and where changes should land"
> [3]:
> https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r9ec7d8801186d3242e6d535adb547ba5068f5a4e0202ec1bd5d8912a%40%3Cdev.avro.apache.org%3E
> "Proposal: RFCs for Avro 2.x"
> [4]: https://github.com/apache/avro/pull/1333 "Backport AVRO-3048"
>

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