At this point I would like to declare branch-2.5 closed for any additional significant changes. It should be in good shape to post 2.5.0RC0 within the month.
We have landed an update of logging to log4j2. A remaining minor issue I am aware of is HBASE-26854, which I will fix this week. If you know of any other related issue please do let me know. Per our recent discussion on dev@ on coordinating the release of StoreFileTracker protobuf definitions and hbase-operator-tools support for SFT structures, SFT was backported to branch-2.5 via HBASE-26826. The 2.5.0 release will ship with enabling bits in hbase-protocol-shaded. We should arrange a concurrent release of hbase-operator-tools support for SFT structures if possible, but that does not block the 2.5.0 release in my opinion because SFT will be called out as 'experimental' in the release announcement. Nick mentioned on HBASE-26419 that he thinks the otel tracing work is now in good enough shape for a release of 2.5.0. Let's pause additional changes to the branch in that regard except for bug fixes until after 2.5.0 is released. I have a promised documentation update (HBASE-26330) and a minor operability improvement (HBASE-26192) that I have been putting off that should be finished now that a RC is imminent. I will wrap them up shortly. If you have any other minor work that should go in to 2.5.0 and haven't gotten to it yet, now is the time, in the next week or so, to commit it. -- Best regards, Andrew
