As you probably know, Hive’s SQL command-line interface Beeline was created by
forking Sqlline [1] [2]. At the time it was a useful but low-activity project
languishing on SourceForge without an active owner. Around the same time, I
independently picked up the Sqlline code, moved it to github [3], put in place
a maven build process, and gave it some love. Now several projects are using
it, including Apache Drill, Apache Phoenix, Cascading Lingual and Optiq. So,
now we have two active forks of Sqlline.
I propose to merge these development forks.
This will achieve a few things. We should be able to fix more bugs, and add
more features, and get more people using sqlline. (Just today, someone ran into
a bug that Drill was not saving/restoring command history, then noticed that it
was fixed in sqlline-1.1.3 [4] [5]. It seems that that bug still exists in
Hive’s beeline.)
I propose the following:
1. Move the parts of hive-beeline module that do not depend upon Hive (about
90% of the code) into a new module in the hive repo, hive-sqlline.
2. What remains in the hive-beeline module is Beeline.java (a derived class of
Sqlline.java) and Hive-specific extensions. The hive-beeline module depends
upon the hive-sqlline module.
3. Make sure that the new Hive sqlline module contains all fixes and useful
changes from both forks.
4. Release sqlline as a maven artifact, say {groupId=org.apache.hive,
artifactId=hive-sqlline} and tell clients of julianhyde-sqlline to migrate to
it.
5. Longer term, consider moving hive-sqlline out of Hive, but still within
Apache.
This achieves continuity for Hive’s users, gives the users of the non-Hive
sqlline a version with minimal dependencies, unifies the two code lines, and
brings everything under the Apache roof.
Please let me know if this sounds like a good proposal. I’ll log a jira case,
then start work on a patch.
Julian
[1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-987
[2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-3100
[3] https://github.com/julianhyde/sqlline
[4] https://github.com/julianhyde/sqlline/issues/19
[5] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/DRILL-327
