[Gluster-devel] Confusion about 1.3pre5*

[Steffen Grunewald]

I'm confused.

I've been watching glusterfs development for quite a while now, and really
enjoyed its rapid development.

I even considered to install glusterfs in a production environment. The
1.3 pre-releases showed a trend towards stabilization, and there were only
a few changes to mainline--2.4 (which is still being announced as the main
branch on the download.php page). 

Then, all of a sudden, stat-prefetch was removed, io-threads still seem to 
be unstable, and there's even a new feature (self-heal) that would have better 
fitted into the 1.4 roadmap, IMHO that introduced a major code and API change
into a release candidate  (I'd have expected a feature freeze at this point, 
and fixes being made to the  2.4 branch while preparing the next devel 
release in 2.5 - or is there even a 2.6 yet?). 

The documentation in the Wiki doesn't refer to release versions nor branch 
versions, so I don't know whether I can still live without self-healing 
and namespace volumes, I don't know what the requirements would be for such 
a namespace volume (some info started to trickle through this list: yes, 
I'd need lots of inodes... still I don't know where to place it - would it 
interfere with the data volume it definitely would have to share the same
disk with? what about performance penalties then?)...

I got the impression that while the target was to release on June 30, the
current development of glusterfs is adding more instability (and perhaps
design flaws?). 

Perhaps I only need a few days off. Perhaps the glusterfs developers do.
I'm not sure. See you in four weeks' time...

Cheers,
 Steffen