Hi all, I would like to start discussing releasing Lucene/Solr 8.0. Lucene 8 already has some good changes around scoring, notably cleanups to similarities[1][2][3], indexing of impacts[4], and an implementation of Block-Max WAND[5] which, once combined, allow to run queries faster when total hit counts are not requested.
[1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-8116 [2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-8020 [3] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-8007 [4] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-4198 [5] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-8135 In terms of bug fixes, there is also a bad relevancy bug[6] which is only in 8.0 because it required a breaking change[7] to be implemented. [6] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-8031 [7] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-8134 As usual, doing a new major release will also help age out old codecs, which in-turn make maintenance easier: 8.0 will no longer need to care about the fact that some codecs were initially implemented with a random-access API for doc values, that pre-7.0 indices encoded norms differently, or that pre-6.2 indices could not record an index sort. I also expect that we will come up with ideas of things to do for 8.0 as we feel that the next major is getting closer. In terms of planning, I was thinking that we could target something like october 2018, which would be 12-13 months after 7.0 and 3-4 months from now. >From a Solr perspective, the main change I'm aware of that would be worth releasing a new major is the Star Burst effort. Is it something we want to get in for 8.0? Adrien
