Hello Dev Community,
I recently subscribed to the Spark developer mailing list and have been going
through the new versioning and release policy documentation.
First of all, thank you to everyone involved in defining and maintaining the
new release cadence.
While reviewing the versioning policy, I noticed that the Spark 4.3 release
schedule indicates:
Aug 1, 2026 - Code freeze / Release branch cut
However, I do not currently see a dedicated branch-4.3 in the GitHub
repository. I can see branches such as master, branch-4.x, branch-4.2,
branch-4.1, and others.
I had a couple of questions:
1. Is Spark 4.3 expected to be released from the long-lived branch-4.x, or
is a dedicated branch-4.3 planned to be created later?
1. Could someone help clarify the branching strategy going forward,
especially with the new quarterly feature release model?
1. For contributors who would like to help address dependency-related
vulnerabilities (for example, upgrading libraries to patched versions to
resolve CVEs), what is the preferred contribution workflow?
* Should contributors first open a JIRA and then submit a PR?
* Is a discussion on the dev mailing list recommended before proposing
dependency upgrades?
* Are security-driven dependency upgrades generally considered
acceptable within feature-release branches under the current versioning policy?
I'm interested in contributing in this area and would appreciate guidance on
the expected process and best practices.
Thank you for your time.
Best regards,
Anoopam Sharma
Architect
