[DISCUSS] Lessons learned from 1.5.0 release

[Christopher <ct...@apache.org>]

My fellow Accumulo developers, I was thinking about some of the
hiccups and/or annoyances in the last release, and I wanted to mention
a few, and give the opportunity for others to add to the list, so we
could discuss what we can do to streamline things when they come up in
the future.

1. Last-minute features are a big problem. Big commits for new
features too close to the feature freeze date do not give adequate
time for proper review, polishing, and testing. These should be rolled
back and postponed to the next non-bugfix release version, so as not
to hold up the release process.

2. More documentation should be automated. Perhaps even automating the
whole website generation (or, at least, most of it).

3. Patches for new features without unit tests should not be accepted.

4. Support for different versions of various dependencies, platforms,
and architectures, should be considered feature, and be subjected to
the feature freeze. If it was already an agreed-upon feature, but
doesn't work, it should be considered a bug, and dealt with as a bug.

I had a longer list, but I'm tired and have forgotten the rest. Please
feel free to discuss these, add to the list, or propose solutions.

--
Christopher L Tubbs II
http://gravatar.com/ctubbsii