: On the 5.x front I wasn't expecting 5.6 release now that we have 6.x but
: was simply surprised to see fix for 4.x and not for 5.x.
As Shawn mentioned: jira issues might have inccorrect fixVersion info if
people don't pay enough attention when resolving (especially with
dups/invalid) but what really matters is what gets committed/released.
Wether or not there are any future 4.x "bug fix" releases depends entirely
on the severity of the bug and the demand from users for fixes --
particularly for security relatd bugs, you might see more effort put into
backporting "farther back" in the release timeline and releasing a 4.10.x
release.
: As for adoption levels, it was my subjective feel reading this list. Do
: we have community survey on that subject? That would be really
: interesting to see.
As a developer, my focus is on building features and fixing any bugs found
in the current major version release branch, w/o worrying too much about
bugs that may only affect older previous major versions. If someone finds
a bug in 5.x, and that bug no longer exists in 6.x, I have less
interested/motivation to look into that bug then something else that
*does* affect 6.x, because there is already a fix/workaround available...
Upgrade to the latest version.
while some users might have (completley understandable) mitigating factors
preventing them from upgrading, that doesn't really affect my
interest/motivation in fixing bugs on older branches, because users who
have reasons preventing them from upgrading to recent major versions
frequently tend to have one thing in common: They have things preventing
them from upgrading at all.
So even if i put in the effort to find/diagnose/fix an old bug, and even
if the project as a whole goes to the effort to build/test/release from an
"older" major version dev branch, the return on investment for that work
is lower then putting the same amount of effort into bug fixes on a
"newer" major version dev brach.
For example: let's say hypothetically the Solr user base was devided
evenly into 3rds: 1/3 using 6.x.0, 1/3 using 5.y.0, 1/3 using 4.z.0. In
theory, if 3 diff bugs affect each of those 3 versions to the same degree,
then the number of users impact by a 4.z.1 bug fix would same as the
number of users impacted by a 5.y.1 or a 6.x.1 bug fix -- but in practice,
the number of 4.z.0 users who are likely to upgrade to 4.x.1 is much lower
then the number of 5.y.0 users who would upgrade to 5.y.1, which is less
still then the number of 6.x.0 users who will upgrade to 6.x.1.
-Hoss
http://www.lucidworks.com/
