On 3/27/2017 5:51 AM, John Blythe wrote: > The new versions of solr come out in pretty regular fashion. We are > currently on 6.0. I'm curious what drives you / your team to run the > upgrades when you do. Particular features or patches you're > eyeballing? Only concerned w major releases? Some other protocol that > is set internally?
The pace of development in the Lucene/Solr project is extremely swift. Releases are made when one of the developers feels that enough bugfixes and features have been added to justify a new release, and volunteers to be the release manager. The release manager will decide whether a particular fix or feature under development will delay the release or whether it should wait until the next release. Minor releases are very frequent on this project compared to others. The project is particularly interested in making sure that bugs are found and fixed quickly, but each minor release will also include new features as well. If a nasty bug is found, a buxfix release will usually follow, within the same minor release. Major releases are less frequent, but follow a similar pattern. The next major release is developed in an entirely different branch of the source repository (named master) and it takes quite a lot of work to get that branch ready for release and make sure it works as desired. Like Alessandro mentioned, we do recommend that you try to stay current in your Solr install. If you let your install get far enough behind, you'll probably find that many new versions have been released in the meantime, fixing a large number of bugs and adding new functionality that may benefit your installation. The people involved with developing Solr are also *users* of the software. They are aware of the challenges involved in qualifying a new release before upgrading. Most of them are unwilling to upgrade a production install without first trying the new version out in an dev environment. Thanks, Shawn
