Hi,

now that 0.2.3 is released and 0.3.2 comes closer to a state where it can be released, I want to start the discussion for the 0.4.0 release. It will be a major release with a substantial number of contributions, considering that the last release from master was in October (0.3.1).

Some major new changes in v0.4.0:

• Upgrade to TinkerPop 3.4.1.
• Support CQL for OLAP which completes our CQL support.
• Performance improvements for pre-fetching of properties.
  
• Dropped support for deprecated backend versions.

The release milestone can be found here. It currently contains 2 open PRs and 5 issues. The issues are:

• #915: Support HBase 2.0
• #1513: Add instructions for opting out from codacy notifications
• #734: Add systemd unit file
• #1540: Create noarch rpm spec for rpm creation
• #1541: Create documentation and scripts to create deb packages

The upgrade to support HBase 2.0 seems to be quite a big task and considering that it has been already 8 months since the last release of JanusGraph from master, I suggest that we don't let this delay the 0.4.0 release. We can just support HBase 2.0 in a subsequent 0.4.x release or release 0.5.0 in a few months if we need a major version bump for this.

The other open issues seem to me like they can basically be addressed in any release. I'm therefore inclined to move them to the v0.4.x milestone so they don't delay any release. If someone provides a PR for one of them shortly, we can still include them in 0.4.0 and otherwise they can land in 0.4.1 or 0.4.2.

My plan is to release 0.4.0 soon after 0.3.2, so I will probably continue with the release preparations when we have a VOTE thread for 0.3.2.

Are there any concerns with this plan? Please share any feedback you might have in general.

Regards,

Florian