On one of our open issues about Hadoop versions, one of the Hadoop PMC members mentioned that the 2.6.z line wasn't planning any additional releases[1].
I'd like us to request, as a downstream community, that the Hadoop project plan for maintenance releases on this line given the non-production status of 2.7.0, unevaluated quality of further 2.7 releases and the unknown status of a 2.8 release. Right now, there's substantial evidence from our Elliot that we should be pushing our users from the 2.4/2.5 releases onto 2.6. At the moment, 2.6.0 contains a couple of critical bugs that effectively prevent the use of HDFS transparent encryption[2]. Now, that feature isn't needed but it's nice to have as an operational alternative to our own implementation. And the current bug _destroys_ HBase clusters, so the consequences for the curious are severe. That specific issue aside, however, as a system that runs on top of Hadoop we impose on our downstream users a dependency on that project. Regular maintenance releases are critical to easing long term operational pain, so we should proactively look out for them by prodding our less stable upstream dependencies. [1]: http://s.apache.org/MTY [2]: HADOOP-11674 and HADOOP-11710 -- Sean
