Hi,
I'd like to revive a discussion that was taken some year and a half ago
[1], which included a concept of "BIP" (Beam Improvement Proposal) - an
equivalent of "FLIP" (flink), "KIP" (kafka), "SPIP" (spark), and so on.
The discussion then ended without any (public) conclusion, so I'd like
to pick up from there. There were questions related to:
a) how does the concept of BIP differ from simple plain JIRA?
b) what does it bring to the community?
I'd like to outline my point of view on both of these aspects (they are
related).
BIP differs from JIRA by definition of a process:
BIP -> vote -> consensus -> JIRA -> implementation
This process (although it might seem a little unnecessary formal) brings
the following benefits:
i) improves community's overall awareness of planned and in-progress
features
ii) makes it possible to prioritize long-term goals (create "roadmap"
that was mentioned in the referred thread)
iii) by casting explicit vote on each improvement proposal diminishes
the probability of wasted work - as opposed to our current state, where
it is hard to tell when there is a consensus and what actions need to be
done in order to reach one if there isn't
iv) BIPs that eventually pass a vote can be regarded as "to be
included in some short term" and so new BIPs can build upon them,
without the risk of having to be redefined if their dependency for
whatever reason don't make it to the implementation
Although this "process" might look rigid and corporate, it actually
brings better transparency and overall community health. This is
especially important as the community grows and becomes more and more
distributed. There are many, many open questions in this proposal that
need to be clarified, my current intent is to grab a grasp about how the
community feels about this.
Looking forward to any comments,
Jan
[1]
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/4e1fffa2fde8e750c6d769bf4335853ad05b360b8bd248ad119cc185%40%3Cdev.beam.apache.org%3E
