It looks like the next release of Lucene is going to be 2.4.1, a bug fix release. The Lucene release ‘animal’ has raised its head over the previous months on two occasions, once eyeing a 2.4.1 release, then refocusing on a 2.9 release. Time has seen 2.4.1 land a few more bugs than we had though, so it looks like 2.4.1 is in the final wrapup stages and 2.9 will come next.

2.9 will likely be the last release before 3.0 other than a possible bug fix release. Some very cool stuff coming with 2.9 that I will look ahead to soon. Two from my high interest list: efficient large scale numerical searching and mega FieldCache reopen performance improvements (as well as large performance improvements loading a FieldCache over multiple segments for sorting).