On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 05:11, Avinash Lakshman <avinash.laksh...@gmail.com> wrote: > Point #1 I would love to have committers from outside but the way this > happened took all of us by surprise. Granted we were not on the list but if > I were one of the committers I would have definitely pinged one of the other > committters and asked them as to whether they knew what the hell was going > on. Anyway this is water under bridge now.
Yes ... not much we can do about this anymore. But as said. I am more than unhappy with that too. > I hate bitter confrontation since > it doesn't take anyone forward but only leaves a bitter taste in everyone's > mouth. I have had many personal conversations with Jonathan via chat and I > have nothing personal against anyone, perhaps not everyone but definitely > nothing against Jonathan. That good > The part that is very disconcerting are the following: > (1) If one becomes a committer one is not expected to blitz through the code > base and start refactoring everything. There is a way this needs to be > handled. In any organization one doesn't just go about ripping out everyone > else's code for no rhyme or reason. That will offend anybody. I personally > would not go about ripping someone else's code apart if I had become > committer. It is just that respect ought to be there. Well, this is where I might see a code ownership problem. I think every committer can change everything he wants. Not that he should. And you are right about respectful changes. But in an established project I would not get offended. Unfortunately Cassandra is not an established project in the notion of community yet. > There is a way to get > this done. Changes to code because person X likes something to be in some > particular form and going and just changing that in person Y's code is just > plain wrong. It borders on arrogance which is not the way things should be > done. If I become a committer on Hadoop can I just go and start ripping > apart every class and start making changes just because I don't like the > coding style. Please don't see this as (remotely as) arrogance. What is your stand on refactoring? Maybe even just to understand code better. Is that something out of question for you? > This is a premature project on Apache and I think we need to > keep the original developers in the loop till everyone has some degree of > confidence on the changes made by new committers. +1 > (2) This is something that I have said many times over. Certain things are > the way they are for a reason. For example when I say ConcurrentHashMap is a > memory hog I say it because we have seen this in practice. How does it > manifest itself? I obviously do not recall since all this was over a year > ago. No one can claim to have run tests the way we have in the last year and > a half. One cannot just run some simple test and say well I do not see the > problem. I am not dumb. Anyone having gone through the exercise of having > built a system like this in an organization will realize that the tests are > very intermingled with the organization's infrastructure. I have no time to > rip that all apart and put together a test suite at this point. As long as it is a goal I think it would be good. Or as I said: maybe just forward the testing results to the dev community somehow. > This is just > an example. There are many such instances - after all - we are the ones who > have the operational experience with this and I do not think anyone can > claim to understand the behavior this system in production workloads better > than we do. Probably right at this point or is anyone else using the project in a real world scenario here yet? > My understanding was that new committers come in and start with some feature > implement that and then slowly start looking into what more they could do > going forward. It is NOT come in and refactor the hell out of the system > because you like something to be in a specific way. I do not beleive this > will fly in any community. It is something like we now going through the > entire code base and changing all the stuff just because I like it in a > specific way. This seems ludicrous. Well, I cannot (and frankly also don't want to) judge the contributions over at github. But it appears there is code knowledge. You can never expect someone to catch up on the 2 years you guys have been working on the project. So you will have to deal with someone that is new to the code base. For the project to fly you must be willing to do some mentoring as well. > We may have no experience in open source > but we understand etiquette very well. This just doesn't seem the way things > work in other Apache projects which are successful. We work very closely > with two committers from the Hadoop project who were flabbergasted with the > refactor changes that were going in. That is my gripe with the whole thing. The incubation of Hadoop was very different pre conditions than Cassandra. Which makes it very hard to compare.
