We know we are turning away more and more contributions and new potential > dev community with our 4.0 feature freeze, and it has been going on for a > while now. > > I would like to suggest we create a cassandra-5.0 branch where we can > start to queue up all reviewed and ready-to-go post-4.0 commits. >
I am going to take a stab at closing the loop on this thread. So far no one has indicated any desire to maintain a cassandra-5.0 branch. While people have expressed concerns about what it would mean for the release date and quality of 4.0-rc. As a community we don't have an answer to these concerns. But I would suggest that we are more productive when raising and discussing concrete examples and specific patches where-ever we see a potential impact, like we have done with the messaging system rewrite, those bugs that slipped 4.0-alpha, and the byte array backed cells rewrite. Since a number of people have asked off-list for more detail and clarification on how the cassandra-5.0 branch would work in a way that doesn't require community voting/approval, and incase anyone does step up to take it on, the following is a more detailed writeup to the workflow i was thinking… 1. Patches are reviewed by two Committers on tickets that are marked `4.x`. a. These patches are not relevant for any current versions (2.2, 3.0, 3.11, 4.0) b. If these patches require a CEP, then they must have first passed the CEP. c. These are patches from new contributors that we would otherwise lose. d. Reviewers are not retreating from 4.0-rc efforts. 2. When successfully reviewed, the single commit that makes the patch is committed to the cassandra-5.0 branch. 3. The ticket is transitioned to "Ready to Commit", and a comment added that the patch now resides in the cassandra-5.0 branch. 4. At regular intervals, the cassandra-5.0 maintainers rebase (and rerere) the branch off trunk. a. ci-cassandra.a.o runs CI on the cassandra-5.0 5. When 4.0 is branched and the feature freeze is announced over, an email to the dev ML is sent that the patches parked in the cassandra-5.0 will soon be committed. a. There needs to be a balance here between appreciating late-reviewers who were busy Doing The Right Thing being given a chance to provide feedback, and that two trusted committers have already signed off on the patch. 6. The cassandra-5.0 branch is fast-forward merged into trunk (minus any commits that have had reviews re-opened on them).
