I think we are basically agreeing -- my primary concern is bringing new features in vital paths introduces more risk, I'd rather not backport major new features unless we achieve a higher level of assurance through system and basic fault injection testing.
For the three current examples -- snapshots, zk table locks, online merge -- I actually would prefer not including any in apache 0.94. Of the bunch, I feel the table locks are the most risky since it affects vital paths a user must use, where as snapshots and online merge are features that a user could choose to use but does not necessarily have to use. I'll voice my concerns, reason for concerns, and justifications on the individual jiras. I do feel that new features being in a dev/preview release like 0.95 aligns well and doesn't create situations where different versions have different feature sets. New features should be introduced and hardened in a dev/preview version, and the turn into the production ready versions after they've been proven out a bit. Jon. On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 11:00 AM, lars hofhansl <[email protected]> wrote: > This is an open source project, as long as there is a volunteer to > backport a patch I see no problem with doing this. > The only thing we as the community should ensure is that it must be > demonstrated that the patch does not destabilize the 0.94 code base; that > has to be done on a case by case basis. > > > Also, there is no stable release of HBase other than 0.94 (0.95 is not > stable, and we specifically state that it should not be used in production). > > -- Lars > > > > ________________________________ > From: Jonathan Hsieh <[email protected]> > To: [email protected] > Sent: Friday, March 1, 2013 8:31 AM > Subject: [DISCUSS] More new feature backports to 0.94. > > I was thinking more about HBASE-7360 (backport snapshots to 0.94) and also > saw HBASE-7965 which suggests porting some major-ish features (table locks, > online merge) in to the apache 0.94 line. We should chat about what we > want to do about new features and bringing them into stable versions (0.94 > today) and in general criteria we use for future versions. > > This is similar to the snapshots backport discussion and earlier backport > discussions. Here's my understanding of high level points we basically > agree upon. > * Backporting new features to the previous major version incurs more cost > when developing new features, pushes back efforts on making the trunk > versions and reduces incentive to move to newer versions. > * Backporting new features to earlier versions (0.9x.0, 0.9x.1) is > reasonable since they are generally less stable. > * Backporting new features to later version (0.9x.5, 0.9x.6) is less > reasonable -- (ex: a 0.94.6, or 0.94.7 should only include robust > features). > * Backporting orthogonal features (snapshots) seems less risky than core > changing features > * An except: If multiple distributions declare intent to backport, it makes > sense to backport a feature. (snapshots for example). > > Some new circumstances and discussion topics: > * We now have a dev branch (0.95) with looser compat requirements that we > could more readily release with dev/preview versions. Shouldn't this > reduce the need to backport features to the apache stable branches? Would > releases of these releases "replace" the 0.x.0 or 0.x.1 releases? > * For major features in later versions we should raise the bar on the > amount of testing probably be more explicit about what testing is done > (unit tests not suffcient, system testing stories/resports a requirement). > Any other suggestions? > > Jon. > > -- > // Jonathan Hsieh (shay) > // Software Engineer, Cloudera > // [email protected] > -- // Jonathan Hsieh (shay) // Software Engineer, Cloudera // [email protected]
