branching for 0.6

[John Sichi <js...@facebook.com>]

Hi all,

Ashish, Namit, Paul, Ning, Yongqiang and I met with Carl Steinbach today to kick off some planning for the 0.6.0 release of Hive.  As noted by Ashish in an earlier message, Carl will be driving the release management for 0.6, so please give him any support he needs to get out a quality release soon.  As a first estimate, we agreed to target July 15 for the release date, with the release managed as time-based rather than feature-based.  Carl will be reviewing the state of all features which have gone in since 0.5 and working with contributors to make sure that their functionality and development status (e.g. experimental vs stable) is documented as part of the release.

We propose to cut the 0.6 branch this weekend.  Changes which get committed to trunk by the end of this Friday (June 18) will automatically be included in 0.6.  For anything committed afterwards which needs to be included in the release, it will be necessary to explicitly request that it be backported to 0.6, and it will be the responsibility of the JIRA assignee (not the committer) to provide both the trunk patch as well as the backported patch (in cases where the trunk patch does not apply cleanly against the branch).

We did a brief triage over JIRA and selected a short list of issues as candidates to try to get committed into the 0.6 release (not necessarily before the branch is cut).  For other issues previously marked as Fix Version 0.6, I've changed the Fix Version to None.  The selection was ad hoc (most existing issues with available patches were included, plus some others people thought should be ready in time).  If you feel strongly about other issues, feel free to raise them as additional candidates; attention will be given to those with up-to-date patches available.  But do keep in mind that we're shooting for a time-based release, so if a particular issue doesn't make the cut, get it on the 0.7.0 train instead and start working towards that.  The overall benefit of having a more frequent and regular release series should be a big win for everyone.

Here's the latest list from JIRA:

http://tinyurl.com/2f9k8ff

Note that to avoid spamming, I disabled JIRA email updates while bulk-updating existing issues.

Stay tuned for more from Carl as the release date approaches!

JVS