Hi,

Jan already suggested in another discussion thread that we remove all support (code, tests, and docs) for backend versions that are already end of life (EOL).

He listed these versions there:

• Elasitcsearch: < 5.0.0 is EOL https://www.elastic.co/support/matrix
• Solr: < 6.4 is EOL http://lucene.apache.org/solr/community.html
• Berkeley DB JE: < 11.2.5 is EOL http://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lifetime-support-technology-069183.pdf

On top of that, it looks like the lowest still supported version of HBase is 1.2.10: https://hbase.apache.org/downloads.html

So, we can drop support for HBase 0.98.z - 1.1.z.

I suggest that we remove support for these version for the upcoming 0.4.0 release (or 0.5.0 if we want to release 0.4.0 before that).

If we agree on that, then I further suggest that we make it our policy to remove support for versions of backends that aren't supported any more so we don't need further discussions for this matter in the future every time we want to drop support for a version.

Please respond with your vote on whether we should remove support for these unsupported backend versions or not and whether we further want to make this our general policy from now on.