Cassandra project biweekly status update 2021-10-11

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

Back to Mondays. We'll be covering about a week and a half here to get
ourselves back to a biweekly cadence.

[New contributors getting started]
As a new contributor you have a couple great options for getting started:
Failing tests, and what we call "lhf" (low hanging fruit).

Query for failing tests:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=496
Query for unassigned lhf:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=484&quickFilter=2162&quickFilter=2160

Don't let failing tests fool you - in Cassandra they often turn out to be
incredibly interesting (and tricky) to get to the bottom of.
Right now we're at 28 failing, 26 of which are in the backlog and many of
them without assignees.

For unassigned lhf, we have 11 on 4.0.2 to pick from and 14 on 4.1.0, so
quite the selection if you're looking to get started.

[Dev list discussions in the past 10 days]
https://lists.apache.org/list.html?dev@cassandra.apache.org:lte=10d:

The headliner of this past week and a half has been continued discussion
around transactions in Cassandra, CEP-15, and the tradeoffs we want to
pursue as a project. A lot of folks have chimed in already but, if you
haven't and have a perspective or experience you'd like to share please
take the time to do so.

CEP-16, Auth Plugin Support for CQLSH is undergoing a vote and things look
promising so far.

Benedict surfaced CASSANDRA-17024 (
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/rf428670e07e59ce756f6f7891510f4c8eea82da2c145ec85942c5723%40%3Cdev.cassandra.apache.org%3E),
a ticket dealing with artificial latency injection for testing. The
question came up there on the best way to expose this API to users of it
and the tradeoff on the number of consistency levels we expose to users and
a potential future in which we simplify and constrain those.

Last but most definitely not least, Lorina Poland has done a TON of work on
docs and there's a thread discussing how we want to go about integrating
the contents of https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-16763. The
standing suggestion seems to be to house that work under the epic for
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-16761 so expect to see some
movement there, and Lorina please reach out if you need doc reviewers.

[Tickets in the past 10 days]
On the 4.0.2 front we've closed out 4 tickets. Not too much action on that
front but that's probably because...
For 4.1.0, we knocked out 16 issues including a slew of CEP-10
refactorings, changes, and cleanups. Make sure to rebase your patches in
flight and check out Clock.java for your future timekeeping needs.

[Tickets that need attention]
Zero tickets again in the "Needs Committer" bucket.

Needs reviewer:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=484&quickFilter=2161
We have 4 tickets in 4.0.2 needing a reviewer of varying degrees of
complexity. Any committers with a few spare cycles please lend a hand.
For 4.1 we have 16 tickets that need reviewers. Several broad themes stand
out (auth, btree work, certs) so there may be pairs people can peel off to
review if you have the bandwidth.

And that's a wrap for the last 10 days. A lot is going on and it seems like
momentum *may* be shifting a bit towards 4.1; let's see how that holds over
the next two weeks. As always, thanks everyone for everything you do on the
project, and don't hesitate to reach out on #cassandra-dev on
the-asf.slack.com if you have any questions on the dev front or just want
to say hi.

~Josh