+1 to Henry's comment, once this makes it to the wiki/website the wording
needs to make it clear that the governance model is unchanged
On Mon, May 16, 2016 at 10:02 AM, Theodore Vasiloudis <
theodoros.vasilou...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I like the idea of having maintainers as well, hopefully we can streamline
> the reviewing process.
>
> I of course can volunteer for the FlinkML component.
> As I've mentioned before I'd love to get one more committer willing to
> review PRs in FlinkML; by my last count we were up to ~20 open ML-related
> PRs.
>
> Regards,
> Theodore
>
> On Mon, May 16, 2016 at 2:17 AM, Henry Saputra <henry.sapu...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > The maintainers concept is good idea to make sure PRs are moved smoothly.
> >
> > But, we need to make sure that this is not additional hierarchy on top of
> > Flink PMCs.
> > This will keep us in spirit of ASF community over code.
> >
> > Please do add me as cluster management maintainer member.
> >
> > - Henry
> >
> > On Tuesday, May 10, 2016, Stephan Ewen <se...@apache.org> wrote:
> >
> > > Hi everyone!
> > >
> > > We propose to establish some lightweight structures in the Flink open
> > > source community and development process,
> > > to help us better handle the increased interest in Flink (mailing list
> > and
> > > pull requests), while not overwhelming the
> > > committers, and giving users and contributors a good experience.
> > >
> > > This proposal is triggered by the observation that we are reaching the
> > > limits of where the current community can support
> > > users and guide new contributors. The below proposal is based on
> > > observations and ideas from Till, Robert, and me.
> > >
> > > ========
> > > Goals
> > > ========
> > >
> > > We try to achieve the following
> > >
> > > - Pull requests get handled in a timely fashion
> > > - New contributors are better integrated into the community
> > > - The community feels empowered on the mailing list.
> > > But questions that need the attention of someone that has deep
> > > knowledge of a certain part of Flink get their attention.
> > > - At the same time, the committers that are knowledgeable about many
> > core
> > > parts do not get completely overwhelmed.
> > > - We don't overlook threads that report critical issues.
> > > - We always have a pretty good overview of what the status of certain
> > > parts of the system are.
> > > -> What are often encountered known issues
> > > -> What are the most frequently requested features
> > >
> > >
> > > ========
> > > Problems
> > > ========
> > >
> > > Looking into the process, there are two big issues:
> > >
> > > (1) Up to now, we have been relying on the fact that everything just
> > > "organizes itself", driven by best effort. That assumes
> > > that everyone feels equally responsible for every part, question, and
> > > contribution. At the current state, this is impossible
> > > to maintain, it overwhelms the committers and contributors.
> > >
> > > Example: Pull requests are picked up by whoever wants to pick them up.
> > Pull
> > > requests that are a lot of work, have little
> > > chance of getting in, or relate to less active components are sometimes
> > not
> > > picked up. When contributors are pretty
> > > loaded already, it may happen that no one eventually feels responsible
> to
> > > pick up a pull request, and it falls through the cracks.
> > >
> > > (2) There is no good overview of what are known shortcomings, efforts,
> > and
> > > requested features for different parts of the system.
> > > This information exists in various peoples' heads, but is not easily
> > > accessible for new people. The Flink JIRA is not well
> > > maintained, it is not easy to draw insights from that.
> > >
> > >
> > > ===========
> > > The Proposal
> > > ===========
> > >
> > > Since we are building a parallel system, the natural solution seems to
> > be:
> > > partition the workload ;-)
> > >
> > > We propose to define a set of components for Flink. Each component is
> > > maintained or tracked by one or more
> > > people - let's call them maintainers. It is important to note that we
> > don't
> > > suggest the maintainers as an authoritative role, but
> > > simply as committers or contributors that visibly step up for a certain
> > > component, and mainly track and drive the efforts
> > > pertaining to that component.
> > >
> > > It is also important to realize that we do not want to suggest that
> > people
> > > get less involved with certain parts and components, because
> > > they are not the maintainers. We simply want to make sure that each
> pull
> > > request or question or contribution has in the end
> > > one person (or a small set of people) responsible for catching and
> > tracking
> > > it, if it was not worked on by the pro-active
> > > community.
> > >
> > > For some components, having multiple maintainers will be helpful. In
> that
> > > case, one maintainer should be the "chair" or "lead"
> > > and make sure that no issue of that component gets lost between the
> > > multiple maintainers.
> > >
> > >
> > > A maintainers' role is:
> > > -----------------------------
> > >
> > > - Have an overview of which of the open pull requests relate to their
> > > component
> > > - Drive the pull requests relating to the component to resolution
> > > => Moderate the decision whether the feature should be merged
> > > => Make sure the pull request gets a shepherd.
> > > In many cases, the maintainers would shepherd themselves.
> > > => In case the shepherd becomes inactive, the maintainers need to
> > > find a new shepherd.
> > >
> > > - Have an overview of what are the known issues of their component
> > > - Have an overview of what are the frequently requested features of
> > their
> > > component
> > >
> > > - Have an overview of which contributors are doing very good work in
> > > their component,
> > > would be candidates for committers, and should be mentored towards
> > > that.
> > >
> > > - Resolve email threads that have been brought to their attention,
> > > because deeper
> > > component knowledge is required for that thread.
> > >
> > > A maintainers' role is NOT:
> > > ----------------------------------
> > >
> > > - Review all pull requests of that component
> > > - Answer every mail with questions about that component
> > > - Fix all bugs and implement all features of that components
> > >
> > >
> > > We imagine the following way that the community and the maintainers
> > > interact:
> > >
> > >
> >
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > >
> > > - Pull requests should be tagged by component. Since we cannot add
> > labels
> > > at this point, we need
> > > to rely on the following:
> > > => The pull request opener should name the pull request like
> > > "[FLINK-XXX] [component] Title"
> > > => Components can be (re) tagged by adding special comments in the
> > > pull request ("==> component client")
> > > => With some luck, GitHub and Apache Infra will allow us to use
> > labels
> > > at some point
> > >
> > > - When pull requests are associated with a component, the maintainers
> > > will manage them
> > > (decision whether to add, find shepherd, catch dropped pull
> requests)
> > >
> > > - We assume that maintainers frequently reach out to other community
> > > members and ask them if they want
> > > to shepherd a pull request.
> > >
> > > - On the mailing list, everyone should feel equally empowered to
> answer
> > > and discuss.
> > > If at some point in the discussion, some deep technical knowledge
> > about
> > > a component is required,
> > > the maintainer(s) should be drawn into the discussion.
> > > Because the Mailing List infrastructure has no support to tag
> > threads,
> > > here are some simple workarounds:
> > >
> > > => One possibility is to put the maintainers' mail addresses on cc
> > for
> > > the thread, so they get the mail
> > > not just via l the mailing list
> > > => Another way would be to post something like "+maintainer
> runtime"
> > in
> > > the thread and the "runtime"
> > > maintainers would have a filter/alert on these keywords in
> their
> > > mail program.
> > >
> > > - We assume that maintainers will reach out to community members that
> > are
> > > very active and helpful in
> > > a component, and will ask them if they want to be added as
> > maintainers.
> > > That will make it visible that those people are experts for that
> part
> > > of Flink.
> > >
> > >
> > > ======================================
> > > Maintainers: Committers and Contributors
> > > ======================================
> > >
> > > It helps if maintainers are committers (since we want them to resolve
> > pull
> > > requests which often involves
> > > merging them).
> > >
> > > Components with multiple maintainers can easily have non-committer
> > > contributors in addition to committer
> > > contributors.
> > >
> > >
> > > ======
> > > JIRA
> > > ======
> > >
> > > Ideally, JIRA can be used to get an overview of what are the known
> issues
> > > of each component, and what are
> > > common feature requests. Unfortunately, the Flink JIRA is quite
> > unorganized
> > > right now.
> > >
> > > A natural followup effort of this proposal would be to define in JIRA
> the
> > > same components as we defined here,
> > > and have the maintainers keep JIRA meaningful for that particular
> > > component. That would allow us to
> > > easily generate some tables out of JIRA (like top known issues per
> > > component, most requested features)
> > > post them on the dev list once in a while as a "state of the union"
> > report.
> > >
> > > Initial assignment of issues to components should be made by those
> people
> > > opening the issue. The maintainer
> > > of that tagged component needs to change the tag, if the component was
> > > classified incorrectly.
> > >
> > >
> > > ======================================
> > > Initial Components and Maintainers Suggestion
> > > ======================================
> > >
> > > Below is a suggestion of how to define components for Flink. One goal
> of
> > > the division was to make it
> > > obvious for the majority of questions and contributions to which
> > component
> > > they would relate. Otherwise,
> > > if many contributions had fuzzy component associations, we would again
> > not
> > > solve the issue of having clear
> > > responsibilities for who would track the progress and resolution.
> > >
> > > We also looked at each component and wrote the names of some people who
> > we
> > > thought were natural
> > > experts for the components, and thus natural candidates for
> maintainers.
> > >
> > > **These names are only a starting point for discussion.**
> > >
> > > Once agreed upon, the components and names of maintainers should be
> kept
> > in
> > > the wiki and updated as
> > > components change and people step up or down.
> > >
> > >
> > > *DataSet API* (*Fabian, Greg, Gabor*)
> > > - Incuding Hadoop compat. parts
> > >
> > > *DataStream API* (*Aljoscha, Max, Stephan*)
> > >
> > > *Runtime*
> > > - Distributed Coordination (JobManager/TaskManager, Akka) (*Till*)
> > > - Local Runtime (Memory Management, State Backends, Tasks/Operators)
> (
> > > *Stephan*)
> > > - Network (*Ufuk*)
> > >
> > > *Client/Optimizer* (*Fabian*)
> > >
> > > *Type system / Type extractor* (Timo)
> > >
> > > *Cluster Management* (Yarn, Mesos, Docker, ...) (*Max, Robert*)
> > >
> > > *Libraries*
> > > - Gelly (*Vasia, Greg*)
> > > - ML (*Till, Theo*)
> > > - CEP (*Till*)
> > > - Python (*Chesnay*)
> > >
> > > *Table API & SQL* (*Fabian, Vasia, Timo, Chengxiang*)
> > >
> > > *Streaming Connectors* (*Robert*, *Aljoscha*)
> > >
> > > *Batch Connectors and Input/Output Formats* (*Chesnay*)
> > >
> > > *Storm Compatibility Layer* (*Mathias*)
> > >
> > > *Scala shell* (*Till*)
> > >
> > > *Startup Shell Scripts* (Ufuk)
> > >
> > > *Flink Build System, Maven Files* (*Robert*)
> > >
> > > *Documentation* (Ufuk)
> > >
> > >
> > > Please let us know what you think about this proposal.
> > > Happy discussing!
> > >
> > > Greetings,
> > > Stephan
> > >
> >
>
