Many large‑scale Cassandra users have had to maintain private feature back-port forks (e.g., CEP‑37, compaction optimization, etc) for years on older branches. That duplication adds risk and pulls time away from upstream contributions which came up as a pain point in discussion at CoC this year.
The proposal we came up with: an official, community‑maintained backport branch (e.g. cassandra‑5.1) built on the current GA release that we pilot for a year and then decide if we want to make it official. The branch would selectively accept non‑disruptive improvements that meet criteria we define together. There’s a lot of OSS prior art here (Lucene, httpd, Hadoop, Kafka, Linux kernel, etc). Benefits include reduced duplicated effort, a safer middle ground between trunk and frozen GA releases, faster delivery of vetted features, and community energy going to this branch instead of duplicated on private forks. If you’re interested in helping curate or maintain this branch - or have thoughts on the idea - please reply and voice your thoughts. ~Josh
