Now, here's the rationale: speaking from an experience of building > a community-driven distribution on top of Hadoop releases I can > attest to how badly we (and all the downstream projects) need a > stable 2.x baseline. Perhaps a less featurefull one, but the one > that would parallel stability of 1.x code line. > > The downstream projects are struggling mightily with the fact that > it is never quite safe to assume 2.0.x to be stable (to be honest > we labeled it alpha for a reason). We have to have *something*. >
Roman, I think no one disagrees with the need for stabilization. Even before this vote started, we were moving towards stability from 2.0.4-alpha to 2.0.5-beta with main focus on API/protocol compatibility, which I assume is the most important thing for downstream projects. > > Of course, as you point out, the fact that a more featureful > 2.1.x line now might become incompatible with a stable base > of 2.0.x is something to worry about. I've struggled with it > myself and finally accepted it as a much lesser evil. > > I think this is a bad idea. I am personally against incompatible 2.1.x. The lesser evil I see is, spending possibly few more days of including well tested features, instead of suddenly appearing on release discussions, starting this vote, disrupting the previous decisions and insisting on spinning out a release at any cost, without clearly articulating what the plans for stabilizing are or what compatibility will be guaranteed. Finally, imagine that we're successful with 2.0.x stabilization and all > of the downstream now has it as a default profile(*) I can guarantee > you that it would generate tons of additional feedback that would > be quite useful to future stabilization of 2.1.x. At this point this > feedback is lost. > I do not think feedback is lost. We are getting this feedback from many folks who are spending time, building features and testing features. We also get the feedback from 0.23 stabilization, which has immensely helped 2.x. No one is disagreeing about the need for quickly going to 2.0 GA. The disagreement is on the path towards that. Regards, Suresh
