Plans for a 2.17.2 and 2.18.0 release

[Bret McGuire]

   Greetings all!  I've finally freed up a bit of time to work on the next C/C++ driver release and wanted to let everybody know what our plans in this area look like.

   We begin with 2.17.2, specifically some upgrades around platform support for this release.  CentOS 7 is now end-of-life (EOL) so in keeping with the policy across our drivers of supporting only those platforms that are not EOL at time of release we will no longer be testing against CentOS (CPP-1001).  With this change our test suite on Linux will consist of Ubuntu and Rocky only.  While we're on that topic: Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble Numbat) has now been released so we will be adding testing for this Ubuntu version in 2.17.2 (CPP-1003).

   One additional note on platform support and testing: I'm currently working on migrating the AppVeyor builds for Windows to Github Actions.  This allows us to test against more modern MSVC platforms and is also somewhat easier to administer.  You shouldn't notice any change in day-to-day operations once this is rolled out.

   The 2.17.2 release will also now be tested against a few new versions of Cassandra.  We'll be adding Apache Cassandra 4.1.x and 5.0.x (CPP-1002) as well as DSE 6.9.x and HCD 1.0.x (CPP-1004).  Of course we'll also be addressing a number of existing issues with the 2.17.2 release as well.

   Finally, a word on the future of our support for C++ standards.  The driver currently makes a best-efforts attempt to follow C++98 although we don't claim strict compliance, especially in the third-party libraries we leverage (most of these have moved on to C++11 at least).  C++98 is now well over a decade old, however, and it's time to upgrade here just as we have with our platform support.  Starting with the next minor upgrade (2.18.0) we'll be moving to C++11 as the minimum supported C++ standard.  We'll also add explicit support for a given standard to the build process in order to ensure that we stay within bounds (CPP-1000).  This change will also bump the minimum supported version of cmake to 3.1.0 but hopefully this won't be too burdensome (as 3.1.0 was released six years ago).

   Thanks for your patience everyone; I'm excited to see some movement on this driver again!

  - Bret -