Hi HBasers, Time for the second proposal of the day!
I'd like to start a discussion around the version number of the upcoming "durable HBase" release. The release I'm referring to is the one currently being worked towards on trunk, and the one that FB and Cloudera plan to work with for production clusters round about Q3 2010. The current name for this release is 0.21. I think this is going to cause user confusion due to the previous "lockstep versioning" that HBase has had with regard to Hadoop. I think many people will assume they need to use Hadoop 0.21 (being billed as an unstable release at least for 0.21.0) and generally not quite understand why our version number is the same if we have no tie to the Hadoop version. So, I am generally -1 on calling this next HBase release 0.21.0. The other factor is that I think we all see this upcoming release as a major step up from 0.20. Namely, it provides true durability of every write, much improved cluster stability, a new build system, replication, and countless other improvements that everyone's been cranking on. I'm sure given the number of people now working on the project, we'll see even a few more great improvements pop up before we're ready to freeze. Some have suggested we jump all the way to HBase 1.0. I think this is a bit ambitious, as 1.0 implies a level of API stability we're not quite ready to commit to. Perhaps we can go there some time next year, but don't want to open that can of worms yet :) So, beyond not liking either 0.21 or 1.0, I don't have a strong opinion. Some have suggested 0.90, as it is lexically much bigger than 0.20 but clearly not 1.0 yet. Others have suggested 0.30, to give us room to go to 0.40, 0.50, etc before a 1.0. Thoughts? -Todd -- Todd Lipcon Software Engineer, Cloudera
