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[rdf4j-dev] planning ahead: 3.7 vs 4.0
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Hi folks,
Looking ahead after the 3.6 release, we have a decision to make: do we want to focus on getting a new major release out the door, or do we want to continue the 3.x series for a while longer?
The main justification for a major release are that we can do breaking changes: remove deprecated code, major refactors, or even deciding to bump our minimally-supported Java version (I must admit I'd _really_ like to bump to Java 11, but I understand the hesitation from some of our vendor partners).
Typically, to make the pain of upgrading for a major version easier to swallow for our users, we would accompany that with some massively useful improvements and new features as well.
So the question is: do we have enough material to justify making the next release a major one?
Here's what's currently planned for the 4.0.0 milestone:
Almost all of this is purely "housekeeping": removing obsolete code etc. Important, but not really particularly exciting to users. Perhaps the most interesting thing is the task to make each package contained in only a single module (to allow for use as part of a Java 9 modular architecture).
We have a substantial backlog of feature requests and bugs. On my radar as big/important new features for 2021 are the use of SHACL validation against a (remote) repository / SPARQL endpoint, and further upgrades and extensions of our RDF* support. I'm also thinking that planning this for a major release at the outset gives us some freedom: we don't have to jump through so many hoops to make sure everything remains backward compatible (though of course even with a major release, if we can keep it compatible, we probably should).
Where do you stand on this? What are your big 2021 must-haves for RDF4J (if any)?
As an aside: regardless of whether the next release after 3.6 is a major or a minor, we will need to go through a release review for this one, as it's been a year since the last review.
Jeen
