[Moved to a new thread because this topic is important by itself] There are some excellent points here - thanks for bringing this up.
> What can inspiring developers contribute to 4.0 > that would move the project forward to it’s goals and would be very likely > included in the final release? That is a hard question with regards to the tickets I listed. My goal was to list the large, potentially breaking changes which would necessitate a move from '3' to '4' major release. Unfortunately in this context, those types of issues have a huge surface area that requires experience with the code to review in a meaningful way. We are kind of in this trap now with the Gossip 2.0 tickets. There are very few people who feel comfortable enough to give Jason feedback on the patches because he has effectively replaced (necessarily, IMO) seven years of edge case fixes baked into the current implementation. And that stuff is just hard in the first place. I'm not completely sure what the answer is here. I will tell you that from my own experience, an excellent way to get familiar with the code and concepts would be to look at some of these large tickets in detail, go through what changed and ask some questions about the choices made. Community is based on participation, conversation and exchange of knowledge. The more involvement we have in day to day exchanges, the more we all learn and the healthier things will become. > What should people work on that would not be > left ignored, because there’s no need for it or no time to really take care > of it? We have a huge pile of backlogged tickets in "unresolved" and "patch available." Going through these and testing, reviewing, submitting patches, even pinging on status, rebasing if needed would be awesome. Frankly, we need the help. Another thought - "I would like to add X, how should I go about doing this?" is an excellent conversation to start on the mail list: https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/0ecddfb2ecc72e8c5f4027d96b72345d3476edfe0094f89b42a93539@%3Cdev.cassandra.apache.org%3E > > Each contribution > deserves some kind of response and even if it’s just a “not relevant for > next release, will look into it another time” type of reply. I completely agree. Per the above, anyone should feel like they can chime in on tickets. It's a community effort. Particularly if you are an operator - your thoughts, experiences and opinions matter (to me at least) like 10x what a developer thinks for anything with operational or end user impact. > Having clear > goals or a certain theme for the release should make it easier to decide > what to review and where to decline. Does that make sense? I think anything *new* with a large surface area not already well underway (and maybe some things that are?) should be tabled for 5 at this point. We really need to focus on stability via community involvement.
