Hi everyone. On one of our quarterly reports to the ASF board we got some comments about how dev@ is a ghost town. It would be very hard to discern the direction of the project from it at this point. So, Mike, Till and I discussed and came up with something that hopefully should remedy that and breathe some life back into the list.
The general idea is to discuss major new features or improvements on the list, and to have a vote and some sort of PMC involvement with them. That way hopefully knowledge of them will be more distributed among all the committers. Please discuss the proposal. It's not set in stone of course, we can change things. This was mostly gleaned from similar processes in other projects, ASF and otherwise. --------- Rationale --------- AsterixDB, being a database system, is designed to be a user-facing system, but also to be a foundation for other applications. Therefore any changes, improvements, or alterations made can be of great consequence to those dependent applications. Given this, these types of changes need to be considered closely and clearly in public, to give the greatest insight as to what the consequences of them might be. Many of these processes already exist informally within the project, and this document is in part an attempt to codify them. ------------------ When is it needed? ------------------ If the change is: - adding a new feature - changing the interface (internal or otherwise) of an existing feature or otherwise fundamentally modifying its behavior - introducing any kind of potential backwards incompatibility to the persistent artifacts produced by AsterixDB --------------------------- Components and Requirements --------------------------- An APE should consist of: - A Confluence document describing the proposed design of the enhancement, it's risks and rewards, and possible alternatives (if applicable) - A JIRA issue to track the improvement, linking to the aforementioned document - A designated PMC member (who can be the proposer) to shepherd the enhancement - A list of the Committers and Contributors who will work on the enhancement By default all APEs should go to the latest development branch, but if it is intended for an older stabilization branch this should be explicitly mentioned as it is an important consideration. All of this information should be posted to [email protected] in a [DISCUSS] thread. After the discussion seems to come to a conclusion of some sort, then a [VOTE] should be issued and kept open for 72 hours. The vote is analogous to the process for releases.
