Branching and release candidate plan for 0.18

[Rohini Palaniswamy <ro...@apache.org>]

Hi all,
   We have had a lot of patches committed in the past 2 months and tests
cleared to run for all the recent versions of Hadoop/Tez/Spark/Hive/HBase,
thanks to Koji. We are now close to the really long due release with only 3
more patches pending and hopefully checked in by tomorrow. After that, the
plan is to recreate the branch-0.18 to pull in all the changes in the trunk
and have the first release candidate by the weekend or beginning of the
week which I will be working on with help from Koji. Please reach out in
this thread, if anything is required from this release perspective.

Regards,
Rohini