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We plan to move to a time based release cadence for Apache Kafka. This document highlights the motivation for a time based release and discusses how time based releases will work for Apache Kafka in detail.

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1. We will use three digits for the version: major.minor.bug-fix. The first digit would indicate the major revision (starting at 1), and second indicating minor revision, and the last one number indicating the bug-fix revision.
2. When preparing RCs of the release we will still suffix it after the release version number. I.e. major.minor.bug-fix [rc_number]

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Feature releases will be a minor release by default (i.e. we will only bump up the minor revision digit) unless:

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In those cases, we will bump the major revision digit. 

Schedule

The proposed schedule for Apache Kafka is shown below. We will do a release in October and align the releases from January in 2017. We will follow a 4 month schedule for Apache Kafka releases.

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