[KAFKA-5637] Document compatibility and release policies

• Type: Improvement
• Status: In Progress
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Component/s: documentation
• Assignee: Sönke Liebau
• Reporter: Ismael Juma
• Created: 25/Jul/17 15:09
• Updated: 17/Feb/19 19:00

Description

We should document our compatibility and release policies in one place so that people have the correct expectations. This is generally important, but more so now that we are releasing 1.0.0.

I extracted the following topics from the mailing list thread as the ones that should be documented as a minimum:

Code stability

• Explanation of stability annotations and their implications
• Explanation of what public apis are
• *Discussion point: * Do we want to keep the unstable annotation or is evolving sufficient going forward?

Support duration

• How long are versions supported?
• How far are bugfixes backported?
• How far are security fixes backported?
• How long are protocol versions supported by subsequent code versions?
• How long are older clients supported?
• How long are older brokers supported?

I will create an initial pull request to add a section to the documentation as basis for further discussion.