TL;DR: I am having difficulty on deciding on a release that is stable to use and would like this to be easier.
Recently it has been rather difficult to figure out what release to use based on its stability. This is probably in part because of the rapid release cadence and also the versioning being employed upon a release. To demonstrate what I mean, let me walk through some of the process we've had for determining what version to use starting at version 8.1.0: 1) 8.1.0 could not be used because of NPE (SOLR-13475) so we upgrade to 8.1.1 2) 8.1.1 could not be used because of intermittent 401s (SOLR-13510) so we looked for a patch version 8.1.2 - which does not exist. So instead we looked into upgrading to 8.2.0 (which includes new features and improvements alongside bug fixes). 3) 8.2.0 is fine except for CVE-2019-12409 caused by a bad configuration. This is still a good stable candidate if the configuration is simply changed (or solr is properly secured through networking measures anyway). 4) 8.3.0 contains a bug that causes data loss during inter-node updates SOLR-13963 so must use patch version 8.3.1 5) Versions 8.4.0 and 8.4.1 have since been released and they seem stable so far. Now, we are considering 8.2.0, 8.3.1, or 8.4.1 to use as they seem to be stable. But it is hard to determine if we should be using the bleeding edge or a few minor versions back since each of these includes many bug fixes. It is unclear to me why some fixes get back-patched and why some are released under new minor version changes (which include some hefty improvements and features). To clarify, I am mostly asking for some clarity on which versions *should* be used for a stable system and that we somehow can make it more clear in the future. I am not trying to point the finger at specific bugs, but am simply using them as examples as to why it is hard to determine a release as stable. If anybody has insight on this, please let me know.
