Noah,
Noah Slater wrote:
Miles,
Thank you for taking the time to write. Apologies for the delayed response.
Thanks for the reply and the details. I was afraid my comments were
falling on deaf ears, or that I'd offended folks.
Glad to hear that Couch is still alive and well - I'm about ready to
commit to using it on a major project, and recent developments have
given me some pause. (Also, I just think that Couch is plain cool.)
It is unfortunate that Damien decided to leave the project, but the ASF is
set up, specifically, so that projects do not stagnate away when one person
leaves. Damien was "just another comitter" in the eyes of the Apache way,
in any case, he had not even been active in the year prior to his
departure. We're very fortunate actually. CouchDB has a thriving community.
So I know we'll be fine.
Well sometimes.... I've seen different levels of momentum for different
ASF projects. It still seems to be very dependent on having a committed
core team. Also, ASF seems to have an awful lot of Java-based projects,
where Couch is erlang-based.
We do not have a roadmap at the moment. Which is a bad thing. We should
have a roadmap. But you suggest that it doesn't look like we're planning to
do anything besides bug fixes and incremental feature addition. Isn't that
how most products evolve? What sort of thing were you hoping for? One very
big change on the (in my head) roadmap is the merging of BigCouch in to
CouchDB.
It's always struck me that the replication mechanisms are a lot less
robust than advertised. Great PowerPoints, but scalability seems
lacking, and the need to set up pair-wise replication seems
unmanageable. I hadn't realized that the BigCouch code was being
integrated - that's important. (I keep thinking that a multi-cast
publish-subscribe update mechanism - something like a gossip protocol -
would be a key next step. Something like that may come out of what
we're working on, but not for a while.)
1. Who is really driving CouchDB right now? Is there an individual or core
group who are really providing vision and momentum (some folks are obvious,
but where are priorities)? How do the players overlap with the various
other efforts going on. In other words: what's the ecosystem for Couch and
Couch-related software, projects, ....? (Can't tell the players without a
scorecard.)
With the departure of Damien, I have been talking a lot to Jan about things
we can do to help kick things up the arse a little bit. We both feel like
we've been neglectful, and want to use this as an opportunity to double
down our efforts, and inject this community and this project with a bit of
love again.
That's good to know.
We're not the only ones prompted in to action by the recent events.
Cloudant used Damien's departure as a prompt to announce that they were
donating BigCouch to the project. I know that other individuals too, from
the PMC, the committers, and the wider community, have been rallying
together.
As is that!
2. It would be particularly helpful to those of us new to the project to
see a NEW summary of what it is that defines CouchDB, particularly as
distinct from the various efforts that have spun out of Couch, and what's
the current vision/priority for the future. What are the core capabilities
provided, core mechanisms, .... ?
That's a great suggestion, and we definitely need something like that.
Watch this space.
Cool.
Sort of strikes me a bit like what happened when Ubuntu showed up. It's
still not clear how it relates to Debian.
As an ex-Debian developer, that's a bit of a sore point. ;)
As a Debian user, too. Sigh...
Cheers,
Miles
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
