Cassandra project biweekly status update 2021-09-29

[Joshua McKenzie <jm...@apache.org>]

I can't help but notice these project emails have slipped a touch later in
the week; I'll do my best to get us back on track on every other Monday in
a week and a half.

So that said, how have the past two weeks looked?


[The Discussions]
https://lists.apache.org/list.html?dev@cassandra.apache.org:lte=14d:
- Congratulations again to Alexei Zotov on receiving the commit bit!
- Further discussion on CEP-15 has gone on; lots of interest in general
purpose transactions and lots of good discussion about various approaches
and their pros and cons. The authors been quite responsive so if you have
any questions or thoughts, please don't hesitate to chime in.
- Pluggable auth for CQLSH is formally proposed for CEP-16 (
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/ree85077637f14435e9eb14e0db887d2e9d94e956ccbf1e1ac9d53aa2%40%3Cdev.cassandra.apache.org%3E
)
- Sam and a couple others put forward some structural refactorings for
CEP-10 and we've seen some of those patches proposed and are likely to come
through this week (
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r63f6f6b41c9c053b1cadb4cb588c23143c5e0d4c04ea2219cef49413%40%3Cdev.cassandra.apache.org%3E),
so be on the lookout for that and needing to rebase some work in flight.

[The Tickets]
https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=484&quickFilter=2175

4.0.2:
We've closed out 19 tickets in 4.0.2 in the past couple of weeks with quite
a few test fixes in the mix.

4.1.0:
8 tickets landed in the past couple of weeks including configurable CL for
auth operations, DELETE and TRUNCATE on virtual tables, soft and hard
limits to local reads and more.

[Needs Reviewer or Committer attention]
We have a collection of 23 tickets that currently could use help in the
review space: see columns BLOCKED, NEEDS REVIEW, and IN REVIEW on the
following filter:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=484&quickFilter=2161

Anyone that has some spare cycles to review, that'd be greatly appreciated.
Nothing's currently blocked on needing committer attention which is a nice
first for this dev update. ;)

[New Contributors]
For those looking to get started and involved in contributing to the
project, check out the following filter:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=484&quickFilter=2160&quickFilter=2162

We have a collection of about 22 tickets between 4.0.2 and 4.1.0 that would
be great for a new contributor to cut their teeth on.

[Test Failures]
We've climbed up to 37 test failures in our test failure query:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?filter=12350869

I pulled together a board so we can report on this and check out trends on
the workload - looks like we're trending towards more open than closing out:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=496&projectKey=CASSANDRA&view=reporting&chart=cumulativeFlowDiagram&swimlane=1233&swimlane=1234&column=2195&column=2196&column=2197&days=90

I'll probably open up a thread on the ML about the topic as this is
something we've struggled to keep on top of as a project for a long time.

So a lot of good things are happening and we have one ongoing challenge for
us to keep on top of. Been a good two weeks; thanks everyone as always for
everything you do!

~Josh