Hi, All Helix 0.7.x branch has been there for a while, however, given it has back-incompatible API changes, most of our exiting customers are reluctant to move to 0.7. This forces us to maintain both branches, in addition, most of recent new features and important fixes (task framework improvements, new auto-rebalancer features) have only been pushed to 0.6.x, which makes two branches diverged further apart. It is especially harder to keep maintaining both branches now.
I proposed to fork a new branch (helix-0.8.x) from 0.6.x, with a new helix-api module containing all new API classes introduced in 0.7, but still also keeps all old API classes (maybe marked as deprecated) in helix-core. In this way, we could push existing customers move to 0.8.x release without forcing them to remodel their codes. Then we only need to maintain a single unified branch, and keep moving forwards to new API with all new developments happening in this branch. I have cloned a 0.8.x-test branch ( https://github.com/apache/helix/tree/helix-0.8.x-test) from 0.6.x, and we (me and Junkai) are going to cherry-pick changes from 0.7.x and apply them to this branch and continue testing it until we reach a point that we can confidently release it :). Please let me know what you think about it, any suggestions or comments are appreciated! Thanks Best Lei
