Happy Thursday, everyone! I wanted to try and kick off a discussion here regarding seeing what we could do about iceberg-rust and increasing the amount of review bandwidth there. Obviously, we're constrained to some degree on all of the iceberg projects but this one is gaining a lot of traction and I've heard anecdotally of many projects beginning to maintain their own forks here because getting code reviewed is just too much of a challenge.
Given that these projects in other languages are generally just trying to achieve feature parity with Java, it really diminishes them when key features are missing. In iceberg-rust, for example: - No positional delete writing support - No deletion vector writing support - No HDFS support One idea that I have to increase reviewer bandwidth here could be to take some key stakeholders from many of the existing OSS rust-based iceberg projects and add them here? E.g. somebody (trusted) from DataFusion (Comet), RisingWave, DataBend, Polars. Perhaps there are also some major companies in the space that might like representatives (for example I see Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Palantir in there). Then that person could at least be the point-person for reviews that are necessary for features in those upstream codebases. To be clear, I'm mainly suggesting that these people are given mandates to review changes to get these projects to parity with the Java versions, and less so focusing on bespoke features specific to one language. I understand that we want all would-be contributors to review as well, but I can come up with a few examples where a change is reviewed adequately by somebody that lacks permissions, and then it eventually goes idle since nobody can supply the approval. Let me know what you think! Thank you! Best, Jordan Epstein (IMC Trading)
