There have been a few discussions in the past on the slack channel and I recently also started a similar thread [0] regarding if we can skip certain releases while upgrading towards pulsar 3.0 and beyond. Starting this dev mailing list discussion to get some more input.
As per official release policy [1] itself, there are some open questions: *Before 3.0, upgrade should be done linearly through each feature version. > For example, when upgrading from 2.8 to 2.10, it is important to upgrade to > 2.9 before going to 2.10. * > This is a very clear statement. Although lengthy, it makes sense to limit the scope of OSS to test upgrades from and to every version. *Starting from 3.0, additionally, live upgrade/downgrade between one LTS > and the next one is guaranteed. For example, * > What does this exactly entail? Does it only mean that I can do 3.0.x <-> 4.0.x ? The example just below is misleading from that perspective > > > *3.0 -> 4.0 -> 3.0 is OK; 3.2 -> 4.0 -> 3.2 is OK; 3.2 -> 4.4 -> 3.2 > is OK; 3.2 -> 5.0 is not OK.* This seems to give a feeling that it is possible to upgrade from any 3.x version to any 3.x or 4.x version including rollbacks. Are we testing this as new 3.x versions release? To add to the confusion, the blog post [2] of 3.2 release mentions this *For the 3.2 series, you should be able to upgrade from version 3.1 or > downgrade from the subsequently released version 3.3. If you are currently > using an earlier version, please ensure that you upgrade to version 3.1 > before proceeding further.* This is confusing now. So 3.2 -> 4.0 would be possible but 3.0 -> 3.2 isn't? Why is 3.2 -> 4.4 possible then? Wish to see the community's take on this in order to align the recommendation. [0] https://apache-pulsar.slack.com/archives/C5Z4T36F7/p1705392242948349 [1] https://pulsar.apache.org/contribute/release-policy/#compatibility-between-releases [2] https://pulsar.apache.org/blog/2024/02/12/announcing-apache-pulsar-3-2/ -- Girish Sharma
