Hi Ted .. and others, I'm here and willing to help.
It's fair to add that the document, once read aft-the-fact, already mentions some of the things that still caused me problems (?user problem?). It's also fair to add that I'm not going anywhere :) I like this project too much to have a few dents derail us. But you are right, the experience has been frustrating at times. I have spent a week trying to get to know the ins/outs of Drill and have some thoughts to share but ultimately I have not seen anything that will not be addressed over time. I have added several jira issues with practical matters and mention that only because there is a common theme to those. I think Drill is already solving specific problems for a core community but the "in the wild" factor/polishing is still missing. This is to be expected even though it can not be the case for long. I look forward to using Drill and if our small startup grows then I hope we will become meaningful contributors. Thank you all for the outstanding work and remember that if mass adoption is a goal then you will have to polish these nuances sooner rather than later. Regards, -Stefan On Mon, Jul 20, 2015 at 3:32 PM, Ted Dunning <[email protected]> wrote: > We just had Stefan over on the user@drill list stick with us through thick > and thin to get a very simple UDF up. He isn't a dolt by any means, but > here is his signature on email describing his state of mind: > > Regards, > > -Stefan (*not the happiest camper*) > > > The only reason that this guy is still with us is that Jim Bates exchanged > quite a number of emails. The clear reason that he had problems is lack of > documentation and thus understanding of how to write a UDF. > > The current state of affairs is that it is unnecessarily hard to contribute > to Drill. This is clearly having a deleterious effect on building the > community of contributors. We need to fix this. > > There is a place on the web site that describes how to write a UDF, but it > is clearly failing to explain the big picture of what is happening and it > doesn't highlight the fact that you aren't really writing Java code when > writing a Drill UDF, but instead are using Java to write in a more limited > language. > > Stefan's recent experience should be a perfect opportunity to improve this > documentation by describing the process better. >
