Release management updates

[Leif Hedstrom <zw...@apache.org>]

Hi all,

one of the things that was discussed on our last Summit was a few minor adjustments to the release process. The proposal at hand is as below, please voice any concerns here before we make this change.

— Leif


1. All LTS releases have a lifetime of 1.5 years (up from 1 year).

2. All incompatible changes should get committed on a branch named e.g. v6/TS-1234, where v6 is the next incompatible release version, and TS-1234 is the Jira ticket associated with this change. It’s up to the committer to keep this branch up to date, and when master opens up for incompatible changes (e.g. after v5.3 is released for v6) merge the branch to master.

3. We will filter out Jira commit messages from all branches with a / (slash) in the name. This avoids those excessive emails and commit messages every time someone rebases or merges master unto one of these incompatible development branches. This was a real hassle when we had the 5.0 branch making it difficult to actually track what changes are happening in Jira.