Five years have passed since we released the initial version of Embulk. It may be a good time to release v1, but we still have had some concerns to step up to v1. It turned out that we have to give up some plugin compatibilities to resolve those concerns. For these one or two years, we have somehow managed with minimum updates, but the limit is approaching.

This year, we steel ourselves to resolve those concerns with incompatible updates, and aim to release v1 eventually. Let us explain the milestones to v1, and expected responses against the incompatibility.

The latest version is now v0.9.23, and we will have the v0.10 series soon. v0.10.* is a “development” series, not for your production use. We will have several incompatibility, tries-and-errors, and experiments through v0.10.*. Many plugins would not work with some points of v0.10.* unless they don’t catch up.

In your production, keep using v0.9.*. The selfupdate command won’t update to v0.10.*. The latest versions of plugins should work with the latest v0.9.* of Embulk. We basically don’t expect more updates in v0.9.*, but we may have a few backports only when plugins cannot catch up with v0.10.* without dropping availability with v0.9.*.

The Embulk core team will take care of plugins under https://github.com/embulk, and some more popular plugins. For other plugins, we hope plugin authors will catch up. If they don’t catch up on a plugin, the plugin will not work with v0.10.* and v1.

We will step up to the v0.11 series as the next “stable” series once v0.10.* settles down. It intends to be production-ready. After we observe and confirm v0.11.* is finally working fine, we would transition to v1.

Stay tuned!

For plugin developers, we have a Slack workspace to discuss and Q&A on v0.10.* issues. Please leave a comment in this Issue if you want to join. (Note: The Slack workspace is for plugin developers not for users. We don’t provide user support there.)

As the first step, please consider start building your Embulk plugin with this Gradle plugin for Embulk plugins.