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1. We will use three digits instead of four for the release versions:
2. 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; when preparing RCs of the release we will still suffix it after the release version number. I.e. major.minor.bug-fix[-rc_number]

Release Dates

• KIP Freeze: TBDSept 13, 2017 (a KIP must be accepted by this date in order to be considered for this release)
• Feature Freeze: TBDSept 20, 2017 (major features merged & working on stabilization, minor features have PR, release branch cut; anything not in this state will be automatically moved to the next release in JIRA)
• Code Freeze: TBDOct 4, 2017 (first RC created now)
• Release: JTBD

These dates are goals and subject to change, but we expect to stay on the Time Based Release Plan unless unexpected critical issues come up. While the target release date is fixed at ~2w after code freeze, RCs will roll out as needed until the release vote passes.

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This is a list of key features/improvements/bugfixes that we can include with release notes (WIP):

• Java 9 support with significantly faster TLS and CRC32C implementations
• JBOD improvements: disk failure disables the failed disk instead of the broker (KIP-112/KIP-113 part 1)
• Idempotent producer supports a maximum of 5 in-flight requests per connection instead of 1
• Improved metrics (KIP-164, KIP-168, KIP-187, KIP-188, KIP-196) and logging
• Improve diagnostics for SASL and SSL authentication failures (KIP-152
• Drop support of Java 7 (KIP-118)
• JBOD support for disk failures (KIP-112)
• Kafka Streams API improvements (KIP-120 / 130 / 138 / 150 / 160 / 161), and drop compatibility "Evolving" annotations 

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• Participate in votes and discussions to land or postpone the open KIPs
• Review patches. We anticipate that this release will be bottlenecked mostly on reviews. The more reviewers, the more content we can fit in.
• Write unit/integration/system tests. We want to preserve the tradition of high-quality releases in Apache Kafka. 

After code freeze:

• Write more unit/integration/system tests. We want to preserve the tradition of high-quality releases in Apache Kafka.
• Improve documentation
• Test the release candidates
• Open bugs on important issues found
• Open blocker JIRAs on critical issues found. Open non-blocker JIRAs on any other issues found.
• Fix critical Fix bugs
• Review bug fixes
• Vote on RCs. Even though only PMC votes are binding, community votes are super important as we evaluate the readiness of the release

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Postponed to subsequent release