Hi Sqoop(2) developers,

we're making very good progress in Sqoop 2 land. Current code base still can't
move any data around, but I'm sure that we're very close to have something
usable and testable soon. With this regard, I would like to propose doing some
pre/alpha/beta/unstable/preview/pick-your-own-word-for-unstable-code release as
soon as possible to provide early adopters first testable bits. My motivation to
provide early bits is to get feedback from actual users as soon as possible, so
that we can incorporate good ideas before it will become too expensive.

However releasing such early state raises question what version should we
release. I would say that most simple idea is to release version "2.0.0",
however due to unstable nature, I believe that it's very bad idea. Hadoop seems
to be adding "-alpha" to the version names, for example "2.0.1-alpha"[1]. I
don't quite like this solution as I would personally expect that there will be
2.0.1 stable (without "alpha" suffix) that won't have any new features but will
be stable soon. As this won't be the case for Sqoop, I would like to propose
slightly different solution that I've seen in some other projects. I would like
to propose doing release 1.99.1. I believe that the version number implies that
it's very far from current stable 1.4 version and very very near to 2.0, but
it's not 2.0 yet. I would like to see other opinions about using 1.99.1 version
for first cut of our Sqoop 2 branch.

I actually did not invent this idea - I've seen in before. For example KDE
project [2] is using very similar approach for quite some time by now as you can
see on their archive [3]. Versions like 4.8.90 or 4.8.95 are "pre-releases" for
4.9. Another example would be Ubuntu one client [4].

Jarcec

Links: 1: http://mirror.nexcess.net/apache/hadoop/common/hadoop-2.0.1-alpha/ 2: http://kde.org/ 3: http://download.kde.org/unstable/ 4: https://launchpad.net/ubuntuone-client/stable-4-0