> Hi Guys, > > I thought I'd chime in on this thread. My comments below: > > I understand and share your frustration, however you need to bear in mind > > that things are done only if people volunteer and have time - usually > > taken from their holiday, weekends, evenings. Chris (who is the de facto > > release master for Nutch and Gora) has not had the time and nobody else > > has volunteered to do it. > > Yep I haven't had the time to push a Gora 0.1.1-incubating release that > will address the Maven issues. However it is on my roadmap for open source > stuff to get done in the next month, so that's a good thing. But yes, that > portion of my open source work is all volunteer time, so sometimes other > things take priority. > > >> As it happens, yesterday was the 1 year anniversary of the last > >> successful Hudson/Jenkins build... If that actually worked, we could > >> point people towards it as a useful recipe for how to get a build > >> working off trunk. I haven't been following Nutch too closely, but it > >> always strikes me as really odd, that there's a nightly build and it > >> doesn't bother anybody that it fails all the time (and that there > >> isn't a nightly build for the stable branches). > > > > The real issue behind all this is what we should do with Nutch 2.0. What > > follows is only my opinion and I would love to hear what others have to > > say on this subject. > > > > Since we (actually mostly Dogacan) wrote 2.0 and delegated the storage to > > Gora, the latter hasn't really taken off since incubation. There have > > been some modest contributions to it but it does not seem to be used > > much and there is virtually nothing happening on it in terms of > > development. More worryingly, the people who initially contributed to it > > are not very active on the project (such is life, new jobs, different > > projects, etc...) anymore·. As for Nutch 2.0, it hasn't made any > > progress in the last 12 months : we still have the same bugs, the tests > > do not work, the build has to be done manually etc... > > Yep. > > > At the same time, there has been a new lease of life into Nutch as a > > whole : there is definitely more activity on the mailing lists, new > > users, new active committers etc... and quite a few bugfixes and > > improvements - most of them backported from what had been done in the > > trunk and people seem fairly happy with what we can do with 1.4 > > Totally agreed. I'm actually not super surprised -- ever since 1.1, I kind > of felt that maintaining a stable 1.X branch of Nutch (in parallel to the > 2.0 efforts) was really going to pay off since there was renewed interest > from users in leveraging (and furthermore accepting) the nuances of 1.X. > > > So the question is : what shall we do with 2.0? Here are a few > > possibilities > > > > > > a) put some effort into it, fix the bugs and make so that it can be used > > instead of 1.x > > b) shelve it and leave it for enthusiasts to play with + make 1.x the > > trunk again > > c) do nothing : keep 2.0 and 1.x in parallel (but having to maintain two > > branches is quite a pain) > > d) abandon the idea of a neutral storage layer with Gora and hardwire it > > to e.g. HBase > > > > Option (a) has not happened in the last 12 months and I am not very > > hopeful about it. > > > > What do you guys think? > > I'd suggest an option e). Evolve and keep releasing 1.X over the next 6 > months, and keep 2.0 in the trunk. After 6 months, see how close 1.X is to > actually being 2.0 (e.g., did we release a 1.4, a 1.5, a 1.6?) If we get > to ~1.6 over the next 6 months and there is still no active development on > 2.0, I'd propose we do this at that point in time: > > 1. branch the current trunk as > https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/nutch/branches/nutchgora 2. grab latest > stable branch (e.g., > https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/nutch/branches/branch-1.6) and *replace* > the Nutch trunk with it, and bump the version # to 1.7-dev 3. active > development on stable becomes active development in trunk and nutchgora > still exists in case anyone ever resurrects it. > > That way, we give another 6 months to see how it shakes out and potentially > allow for 1 or 2 or 3 more stable releases before switching those over to > trunk. > > Thoughts?
Yes. I don't believe we should wait until january before discussing this topic again. I, for example, cannot spend considerable extra time on the issues i put in 1.4, also due to the fact that it's not entirely stable. There are many things i can write about this topic right now but don't feel it's neccessary. The choice is difficult and perhaps painful but when the voting round is opened by our project lead, i will vote for promoting 1.x back to trunk. My apologies for my impatience and pessimism. > > BTW, I have a couple contributions from my CS572: Search Engines class from > a year ago that I'd love to port into the Nutch stable branch including > Hubs/Authorities ranking and some other goodies. I'll try and work on > those over the next few months, I'm just letting everyone know now so I > don't forget again :-) > > Cheers, > Chris > > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ > Chris Mattmann, Ph.D. > Senior Computer Scientist > NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, CA 91109 USA > Office: 171-266B, Mailstop: 171-246 > Email: chris.a.mattm...@nasa.gov > WWW: http://sunset.usc.edu/~mattmann/ > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ > Adjunct Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department > University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
