Hi Andy, Thanks for reaching out. Sorry for not being so active in the community lately.
Since Avro 1.8.2 there has been some activity on the repository again, fixing stuff like security issues and migrating to later versions of Java. Avro has been around for 10 years now, and I would like to keep (some) backward compatibility to make sure that people are still going to use it for another 10 years :) In the past, the idea was to keep the format backward compatibility, this excludes the Java API to. So we did some changes to the API, such as removing Jackson from the public API and aggressively migrating from Joda Time to Java JSR-310. This caused a lot of issues because Avro is deeply nested in a lot of projects. For example, it is a huge task to update Avro in Hive or Hadoop. Therefore we believe that backward compatibility is very important. And I agree that we should mainly focus on the Avro spec itself, and not too much on File I/O and Network etc :) However, if we decide to break an API, we should do it for a good reason. Cheers, Fokko Op wo 22 apr. 2020 om 16:09 schreef Andy Le <anhl...@gmail.com>: > Hi guys, > > I'm new to this vibrant open source community. My story with Avro can be > found here [1] > > While implementing the feature, I got stuck and had various discussions > with Dough Cutting, Fokko Driesprong.... You may see here [2] > > Here my (bias) observations about our current Avro 1.9.x: > > - Some improvements can't be made due to fear of backward > incompatibilities. For example: specifications about named Union. > > - If `Apache Avro™ is a data serialization system.` then the repository > `apache/avro` should solely focus on (de)serialization, right? Currently > our repository contains many nice-to-have-but-not-critical things like: > File I/O, Network I/O.... > > IMHO, I think: > > - We should publicly gather RFCs for Avro 2.x > > - We should move such nice things out of Avro 2.x (may be to other > dedicated repositories) > > What do you think about my suggestions. Pls kindly let me know. > > Thank you & be strong. > > [1] My fork: https://github.com/anhldbk/avro-fork#why-this-fork > [2] My opened issue: > https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-2808?jql=reporter%3Danhldbk%20AND%20resolution%20is%20EMPTY > > >
