[Ann] Status of driver branches and switch to semantic versioning

[Olivier Michallat]

Hi,

Up until now we've been maintaining a driver branch for each Cassandra branch. This led us to maintaining 4 branches in parallel: 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 and 3.0. This adds overhead on our side (e.g. merging changes downstream and upstream),  and for you it means longer waiting periods between releases on a given branch.

To better focus our effort, we've decided to retire two branches:

## 2.0 ##

2.0.12 will be the last release on that branch (barring any urgent issue that would require a hotfix release).

## 2.2 ##

2.2 has been merged into the 3.0 branch and we'll stop working on it. The only significant difference between the two is that 3.0 adds support for Cassandra 3's new schema tables, so the migration path should be pretty straightforward.

In the next few weeks, we'll release 3.0.0-beta1, which we expect to have the final 3.0 API.

For clarity, this doesn't mean we are dropping support for older versions of Apache Cassandra; as you already know, the Java driver is backward compatible with all versions of Cassandra starting with 1.2.

Also, in order to provide clearer compatibility guarantees for users who value stability and for developers of third-party tools relying on the driver, we've decided to switch to semantic versioning starting with version 3.0.0:

- the "patch" version (last number) will be incremented when a release only contains bug fixes: 3.0.1, 3.0.2...

- the "minor" version (second number) will be incremented when a release contains new but backward-compatible functionality: 3.1.0, 3.2.0...

- the "major" version (first number) will be incremented for breaking changes: 4.0.0

(see http://semver.org for the full specification)

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The Java driver team