That is a reasonable proposal - to at least somehow align subprojects with the main Cassandra repository. Cassandra is integrating with e.g. Cassandra Analytics and a lot of times Analytics integrates with what is happening in core Cassandra. The situation now is that even if the feature is in Cassandra's trunk we can not integrate it into Analytics (e.g. writing SSTables with a ZSTD compression dictionary from Spark jobs, or constraints) because there is actually "nothing to integrate with" when Cassandra is not released yet. I think this could speed up the delivery of features because for now we just wait till 6.0 is out to start to integrate it, basically (or we can integrate it already if we run on some concrete commit in trunk but developing against that is like being on a quick sand).
On the other hand, I am afraid that quarterly release schedule for subprojects might be just "way too often". If there is not a lot of traffic in subprojects then sticking to releasing it just for the sake of it is not good either. I think there should be some actual improvements / fixes etc. we want to release instead of just cutting releases left and right "because it's time". This whole release proposal also puts committers / pmcs under more stress / load as we would be basically releasing "all the time" so I would welcome it if other people start to participate in releases as well or we make it more manageable for the actual number of people already actually releasing / verifying. On Thu, Nov 13, 2025 at 4:39 PM Bernardo Botella <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi, > > I would like to take the opportunity to discuss as well the possibility of > adding the subprojects to this release cadence. I think the entire Apache > Cassandra ecosystem would benefit from that consistent and predictable > release schedules, and not only the main project. > > I see potential benefits from this for the subprojects other than the one > discussed in this thread: > - IMHO, this show consistency and care for our users. > - The subprojects are also seen as first class citizens in the Apache > Cassandra ecosystem. > > I understand that different subprojects are at different stages of releases, > (aka, sidecar is under heavy development. Analytics is still fighting with > some issues to release its 0.2.0 version, etc), that may (or may not) make > them not suitable for the general release cadence that we all agree upon, but > at least, aligning with that should be the North Star for everyone. > > Regards, > Bernardo > > > > On Nov 13, 2025, at 7:22 AM, Josh McKenzie <[email protected]> wrote: > > > >> If we decided that Dec 1 is the cutoff, how would that work? > > What do you mean? I don't understand the question =/ > > > > To the question about user confusion, I think Jeremiah covers it. 6.0-beta1 > > and 7.0-alpha1 clearly communicate the different scopes and levels of > > maturity of each release cycle even were they to be made available > > concurrently. > > > > On Wed, Nov 12, 2025, at 2:35 PM, Patrick McFadin wrote: > >> Imagining how this would work. If we decided that Dec 1 is the cutoff, how > >> would that work? > >> > > >
