+1 to what you are saying, Josh. Based on the last survey, yes, everyone was excited about Accord, but SAI and UCS were pretty high on the list.
Benedict and I had a good conversation last night, and now I understand more essential details for this conversation. TCM is taking far more work than initially scoped, and Accord depends on a stable TCM. TCM is months behind and that's a critical fact, and one I personally just learned of. I thought things were wrapping up this month, and we were in the testing phase. I get why that's a topic we are dancing around. Nobody wants to say ship dates are slipping because that's part of our culture. It's disappointing and, if new information, an unwelcome surprise, but none of us should be angry or in a blamey mood because I guarantee every one of us has shipped the code late. My reaction yesterday was based on an incorrect assumption. Now that I have a better picture, my point of view is changing. Josh's point about what's best for users is crucial. Users deserve stable code with a regular cadence of features that make their lives easier. If we put 5.0 on hold for TCM + Accord, users will get neither for a very long time. And I mentioned a disaster yesterday. A bigger disaster would be shipping Accord with a major bug that causes data loss, eroding community trust. Accord has to be the most bulletproof of all bulletproof features. The pressure to ship is only going to increase and that's fertile ground for that sort of bug. So, taking a step back and with a clearer picture, I support the 5.0 + 5.1 plan mainly because I don't think 5.1 is (or should be) a fast follow. For the user community, the communication should be straightforward. TCM + Accord are turning out to be much more complicated than was originally scoped, and for good reasons. Our first principle is to provide a stable and reliable system, so as a result, we'll be de-coupling TCM + Accord from 5.0 into a 5.1 branch, which is available in parallel to 5.0 while additional hardening and testing is done. We can communicate this in a blog post., To make this much more palatable to our use community, if we can get a build and docker image available ASAP with Accord, it will allow developers to start playing with the syntax. Up to this point, that hasn't been widely available unless you compile the code yourself. Developers need to understand how this will work in an application, and up to this point, the syntax is text they see in my slides. We need to get some hands-on and that will get our user community engaged on Accord this calendar year. The feedback may even uncover some critical changes we'll need to make. Lack of access to Accord by developers is a critical problem we can fix soon and there will be plenty of excitement there and start building use cases before the final code ships. I'm bummed but realistic. It sucks that I won't have a pony for Christmas, but maybe one for my birthday? Patrick On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 7:23 AM Josh McKenzie <jmcken...@apache.org> wrote: > Maybe it won't be a glamorous release but shipping > 5.0 mitigates our worst case scenario. > > I disagree with this characterization of 5.0 personally. UCS, SAI, Trie > memtables and sstables, maybe vector ANN if the sub-tasks on C-18715 are > accurate, all combine to make 5.0 a pretty glamorous release IMO > independent of TCM and Accord. Accord is a true paradigm-shift game-changer > so it's easy to think of 5.0 as uneventful in comparison, and TCM helps > resolve one of the biggest pain-points in our system for over a decade, but > I think 5.0 is a very meaty release in its own right today. > > Anyway - I agree with you Brandon re: timelines. If things take longer > than we'd hope (which, if I think back, they do roughly 100% of the time on > this project), blocking on these features could both lead to a significant > delay in 5.0 going out as well as increasing pressure and risk of burnout > on the folks working on it. While I believe we all need some balanced > urgency to do our best work, being under the gun for something with a hard > deadline or having an entire project drag along blocked on you is not where > I want any of us to be. > > Part of why we talked about going to primarily annual calendar-based > releases was to avoid precisely this situation, where something that > *feels* right at the cusp of merging leads us to delay a release > repeatedly. We discussed this a couple times this year: > 1: https://lists.apache.org/thread/9c5cnn57c7oqw8wzo3zs0dkrm4f17lm3, > where Mick proposed a "soft-freeze" for everything w/out exception and 1st > week October "hard-freeze", and there was assumed to be lazy consensus > 2: https://lists.apache.org/thread/mzj3dq8b7mzf60k6mkby88b9n9ywmsgw, > where we kept along with what we discussed in 1 but added in CEP-30 to be > waivered in as well. > > So. We're at a crossroads here where we need to either follow through with > what we all agreed to earlier this year, or acknowledge that our best > intention of calendar-based releases can't stand up to our optimism and > desire to get these features into the next major. > > There's no immediate obvious better path to me in terms of what's best for > our users. This is a situation of risk tolerance with a lot of unknowns > that could go either way. > > Any light that folks active on TCM and Accord could shed in terms of their > best and worst-case scenarios on timelines for those features might help us > narrow this down a bit. Otherwise, I'm inclined to defer to our past selves > and fall back to "we agreed to yearly calendar releases for good reason. > Let's stick to our guns." > > On Tue, Oct 24, 2023, at 9:37 AM, Brandon Williams wrote: > > The concern I have with this is that is a big slippery 'if' that > involves development time estimation, and if it tends to take longer > than we estimate (as these things tend to do), then I can see a future > where 5.0 is delayed until the middle of 2024, and I really don't want > that to happen. Maybe it won't be a glamorous release but shipping > 5.0 mitigates our worst case scenario. > > Kind Regards, > Brandon > > On Mon, Oct 23, 2023 at 4:02 PM Dinesh Joshi <djo...@apache.org> wrote: > > > > I have a strong preference to move out the 5.0 date to have accord and > TCM. I don’t see the point in shipping 5.0 without these features > especially if 5.1 is going to follow close behind it. > > > > Dinesh > > > > On Oct 23, 2023, at 4:52 AM, Mick Semb Wever <m...@apache.org> wrote: > > > > > > > > The TCM work (CEP-21) is in its review stage but being well past our > cut-off date¹ for merging, and now jeopardising 5.0 GA efforts, I would > like to propose the following. > > > > We merge TCM and Accord only to trunk. Then branch cassandra-5.1 and > cut an immediate 5.1-alpha1 release. > > > > I see this as a win-win scenario for us, considering our current > situation. (Though it is unfortunate that Accord is included in this > scenario because we agreed it to be based upon TCM.) > > > > This will mean… > > - We get to focus on getting 5.0 to beta and GA, which already has a > ton of features users want. > > - We get an alpha release with TCM and Accord into users hands quickly > for broader testing and feedback. > > - We isolate GA efforts on TCM and Accord – giving oss and downstream > engineers time and patience reviewing and testing. TCM will be the biggest > patch ever to land in C*. > > - Give users a choice for a more incremental upgrade approach, given > just how many new features we're putting on them in one year. > > - 5.1 w/ TCM and Accord will maintain its upgrade compatibility with > all 4.x versions, just as if it had landed in 5.0. > > > > > > The risks/costs this introduces are > > - If we cannot stabilise TCM and/or Accord on the cassandra-5.1 branch, > and at some point decide to undo this work, while we can throw away the > cassandra-5.1 branch we would need to do a bit of work reverting the > changes in trunk. This is a _very_ edge case, as confidence levels on the > design and implementation of both are already tested and high. > > - We will have to maintain an additional branch. I propose that we > treat the 5.1 branch in the same maintenance window as 5.0 (like we have > with 3.0 and 3.11). This also adds the merge path overhead. > > - Reviewing of TCM and Accord will continue to happen post-merge. This > is not our normal practice, but this work will have already received its > two +1s from committers, and such ongoing review effort is akin to GA > stabilisation work on release branches. > > > > > > I see no other ok solution in front of us that gets us at least both the > 5.0 beta and TCM+Accord alpha releases this year. Keeping in mind users > demand to start experimenting with these features, and our Cassandra Summit > in December. > > > > > > 1) https://lists.apache.org/thread/9c5cnn57c7oqw8wzo3zs0dkrm4f17lm3 > > > > > > >
