Re: [DISCUSS] State of the project 2022

[Francis Chuang]

I'd also like to thank Ruben for being PMC chair this year. Thank you 
Ruben for doing an awesome job as chair for the project and fostering 
the community spirit.

I agree with the comments from other community members that we still 
have some work to do regarding reviewing PRs and getting them merged. At 
the same time, we have made a lot of progress in this area, so I hope we 
will continue to improve as we head into the next year.

Regarding Avatica, I also agree that it's not as popular, but I hope to 
see more contributors and reviewers for the project. Avatica is still an 
essential component for Calcite and a few other ASF projects and I'd 
like to see more contributors for it.

Finally, I'd like to say thank you to existing and new community members 
for answering questions and helping out on the mailing list. Your 
participation helps us foster the community spirit and makes the project 
welcoming to first-time contributors and users.

Community members, you can still nominate someone to be the next PMC 
chair. Please email your nomination to priv...@calcite.apache.org.

Francis

On 21/11/2022 9:47 am, Julian Hyde wrote:
Apologies for my delayed response. This has been a busy week.

I concur with your comments (and responses from Benchao and Stamatis)
about what is working well and not so well.

But overall, I think that this is one of the better years for Calcite,
and the project feels "balanced". There are several regular
contributors. We have the necessary discussions about hard topics, and
find a way to reach consensus. Contributors work for a diversity of
companies, in a variety of geographical locations. Some people seem to
be working for the project in part on their "own time", not "company
time", which (while of course not required) should help us keep
momentum if there is an event like an economic downturn.

Getting PRs reviewed is an eternal problem, but I loved how several
people stepped up recently and reviewed PRs for Avatica.

I also loved how we quickly made releases to address security issues
such as log4j.

Lastly, the tone in email discussions continues to be helpful,
professional, and welcoming. Not every question gets answered (we are
all busy, and are all volunteers) but most important questions get
answered.

I think that Ruben has done an amazing job as PMC chair. Ruben has
worked quietly behind the scenes to get things done (e.g. reminding me
when I launched a vote for a committer but forgot to close it) and has
led by example in reviewing PRs, and in the tone of his
communications.

Thank you, Ruben, for your service to the project.

Julian





On Tue, Nov 15, 2022 at 2:53 AM Stamatis Zampetakis <zabe...@gmail.com> wrote:

Excellent yearly summary, thanks Ruben! You were on top of everything
striving to keep the community healthy and active and at the same time
reviewing PRs and contributing as usual.

I was glad to have you as a chair and also very proud to be part of this
community.

1) What else are we doing well in the project?

* we have a steady release cycle;
* we are reactive to security vulnerabilities;
* we have a rather stable build and CI;
* we have a diverse community and don't depend on a single software vendor;
* we don't have many breaking changes between releases;
* we have automated website publications (thanks Francis!)

2) What areas do we need to do better?

* we need more people to step up and help with avatica (releases etc.);
* we don't have many active committers with all the implications that this
may have (PR reviewing, answering questions, etc.);
* we lack good documentation especially for advanced use cases as pointed
out by others in the dev list;
* we are not very well known compared to other open source projects;

Best,
Stamatis

PS. So far we have received only one nomination for PMC chair from non PMC
members. We would definitely like to see some more participation from the
members of the community; please send your nominations to
priv...@calcite.apache.org


On Sun, Nov 13, 2022 at 2:53 PM Benchao Li <libenc...@apache.org> wrote:

Thanks a lot for serving as the chair Ruben and for preparing the nice
summary!

It's good to see our community grows and evolves as Ruben has mentioned,
and I feel lucky to be part of it myself.

# 2) What areas do we need to do better?

Besides PR reviewing, I could see some of the
questions/discussions[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] in ML did not receive any
replies so for (of course, many of them are replied, I think we should
appreciate these efforts from all of you who have made). I know some of
them require deep knowledge about Calcite and are not easy to answer, even
need some investigation and code study. However, it's frustrating for
users/contributors that their questions get no reply at all. To get better,
I think we can encourage more people to share their thoughts and experience
with the community, especially the non-committers, we would take the ML
more like a communication channel instead of a place for question/answer.

[1] https://lists.apache.org/thread/s5l6ty9s4mxbo292jbrws3m4p8cbwb97
[2] https://lists.apache.org/thread/ytookgxhxoz840zn1n3kdovs48p92wqx
[3] https://lists.apache.org/thread/qt74rms5nbo45vpfnzvzxo56kpnshg3c
[4] https://lists.apache.org/thread/9sd126fpfjphx8r92j3v6d7cygmj56bp
[5] https://lists.apache.org/thread/km70opzrrdlnfmkf11txwpr7vqn758ld
[6] https://lists.apache.org/thread/ytxs2w76jb3vhb4t0gk2h9sc4d74tjlp
[7] https://lists.apache.org/thread/dx80prwty4vbhp9kghrdg3412omhff55
[8] https://lists.apache.org/thread/hyb47skl875xq61r9b491pkmyhf2d31l

Ruben Q L <rube...@gmail.com> 于2022年11月10日周四 03:50写道：

Hello community,

A bit more than seven years ago (22 October 2015) Calcite graduated as a
top-level Apache project [1]. At that point, the community decided to
have
an annual “state of the project” discussion, and we have arrived to that
time of the year.

We have had three Calcite releases so far in 2022 [2] (many thanks to
each
Release Manager), with probably one more coming before the end of the
year.
We have seen great evolutions such as new spatial functions, polymorphic
table functions, Firebolt dialect, parsing parenthesized joins (kudos to
Julian Hyde for dealing with this very old issue), improvements on SQL
hints, and many more.

Regarding the sub-project Avatica, we have seen two releases this year,
and
two more releases for Avatica Go [3] (special thanks to Francis Chuang
for
being the Release Manager for all of them). These were all basically
maintenance releases. It is clear that Avatica has fewer users,
contributors and evolutions than Calcite. More of them will be very
welcome, although I am not sure about how we could promote it.

We have also faced several vulnerabilities for both Calcite and Avatica
during the last year, including the famous log4j issues, and we were able
to deal with them in a swiftly and collaboratively manner.

In terms of community, I think this has been a great year. Calcite
continues to increase steadily its contributors. We see more and more
people participating in email discussions, Jira tickets and Github PRs.
Our
list of committers has grown with Jing Zhang, Benchao Li, Bertil Chapuis
and Dmitry Sysolyatin; and so has our PMC with Chunwei Lei, Vladimir
Ozerov
and Andrei Sereda. Calcite grows and evolves because of (and thanks to)
its
community, so I would like to thank everyone for being part of this
family
and working together in a respectful and motivating environment.

We started the year with an online meetup, which was a great opportunity
for the community to virtually meet and share some interesting
presentations. Perhaps we could begin the discussions to try to organize
another one in the near future (beginning of 2023?), in order to try to
hold at least one every year.

In a less positive aspect, it is probably worth mentioning that we
continue
to struggle on PR reviewing. Our pull-requests list continues to increase
and frequently it is hard to have people reviewing / merging them, and
this
can be frustrating for non-committers. This is an old problem of our
project. We have tried several things to improve it (like metrics and
credit on our quarterly reports; or sporadic "reviewing campaigns",
especially before a release). Any ideas on improving this situation will
be
highly appreciated.

To conclude, I will repeat the questions from previous years:
1) What else are we doing well in the project?
2) What areas do we need to do better?

Please take some time to share your thoughts!
Note that this discussion is for everyone, not only for committers / PMC
members; even if you have never sent an email to the dev list before, now
it is a good time to do so :)

Finally, it has been a privilege to serve as Calcite's PMC Chair this
year.
I have learnt a lot and I am very grateful for the opportunity that I was
given. Following our yearly rotation tradition, I will step down as Chair
by the end of the year, and a new one will have to be chosen. As we
discussed some time ago [4], if you have any suggestion and you would
like
to put someone forward as a potential next Chair, please send an email to
priv...@calcite.apache.org (the PMC will study all proposals, discuss
and
vote).

Best regards,
Ruben

[1] http://calcite.apache.org/news/2015/10/22/calcite-graduates/
[2] https://calcite.apache.org/news/
[3] https://calcite.apache.org/avatica/news/
[4] https://lists.apache.org/thread/gplfqs4snr1b6h62cngyvb65sz41z3fk



--

Best,
Benchao Li