[Retrospective] Release Version 2.11.1

[Divyaasm]

Related release issue?

#4161

How to use this issue?

Please add comments to this issue, they can be small or large in scope. Honest feedback is important to improve our processes, suggestions are also welcomed but not required.

What will happen to this issue post release?

There will be a discussion(s) about how the release went and how the next release can be improved. Then this ticket will be updated with the notes of that discussion along side action items.

[smortex]

We detected an issue and are working to avoid it to happen again

So, there was some kind of mess during the release process 😅. We realized that a bunch of non-bugfix patches had been merged in the 2.11 branch of the projects. This was not great.

#4223 was opened to discuss this and improve this point in the future. This is great.

The community could discuss the issue and how to deal with it

To be honest, I was quite speechless at the very beginning when there was a proposal to "intentionally" ignore the SemVer promise and ship features in a patch release among other resolution plans in #4161. This was terrible.

I am relieved the community decided to revert the wrongly merged PRs in order to get back on track 😄. Thanks to all the people who worked hard for this to happen 😍. This also is great!

This took a lot of time

If I try to do a quick timeline of events, I get:

• 2023-10-16: OpenSearch 2.11.0 is released
• 2023-10-20: a critical bug is reported in [Regression] Request decompression was broken in 2.11 OpenSearch#10802
• 2023-10-24: discussion start about releasing a 2.11.1
• 2023-10-27: an issues is opened to track 2.11.1 release
• 2023-11-30: OpenSearch 2.11.1 is released

So it took ~1 month to release a patch version when a critical issue was found. That does not look great. I understand that this is a large project with a lot of moving parts and a bunch of other fixes where merged. Also the above issue made the process way slower. But I understood branches like the 2.11 one where here in order to be able to quickly cut a new release if a critical bug was found… so 1 month still feels long to me 🤷.

[prudhvigodithi]

@Divyaasm can we close this issue?
Thanks

[bbarani]

Closing this issue as we have released 2.12.0 version.