Hello all,
I've never tried emailing two different project lists at once, but it was suggested that I do so to try to track the conversation across both communities. We'll see how this threads on the mailing lists. There has been a GitHub Discussion https://github.com/apache/iceberg-rust/discussions/2992#discussioncomment-18082533, a GitHub Issue https://github.com/apache/iceberg-rust/issues/3029, and it's been a long topic of conversation in the past two weeks in both the DataFusion and Iceberg Rust Community Calls to discuss moving the DataFusion integration from Iceberg Rust to a separate repository. I will try to summarize some of the major points as I understand them, but the conversations are the ground truth and please feel free to correct me here. The DataFusion TableProvider integration in Iceberg Rust makes DataFusion a dependency for Iceberg Rust. The integration exists for multiple reasons: 1) an engine to execute Iceberg Rust's corpus of sqllogictest files 2) a TableProvider integration for DataFusion users to interact with Iceberg tables Some of the motivations to break out the integration: 1) There have been a number of issues and pull requests against the DataFusion TableProvider in Iceberg Rust as users want to add more features, and they often go stale. I don't believe there are many committers/PMC members familiar with or using the DataFusion integration. 2) Iceberg Rust would like to stay as engine-agnostic as possible. A recent DataFusion Ballista integration was declined for this reason https://github.com/apache/iceberg-rust/pull/2613. 3) Other projects that rely on both Iceberg Rust and DataFusion (e.g., Comet) are blocked by Iceberg Rust upgrading its DataFusion and Arrow dependencies before they can upgrade. Some considerations for both communities: 1) Where would this DataFusion TableProvider live? Most specifically, would it be an Apache-governed project? As folks like @andygrove point out, this can affect whether some community members could contribute to it. There is a datafusion-contrib org for DataFusion-related projects to have visibility but no Apache governance, but there may be options to put it under an Apache repository. 2) How would Iceberg Rust continue to run sqllogictests for regression testing? Does this live in a different repository that depends on this new Iceberg Rust TableProvider crate? Would we be able to test Pull Requests on Iceberg Rust with sqllogictests? 3) @kevinqliu is familiar with the Python bindings in Iceberg Rust, and I believe that DataFusion dependency might be removed as well, but that is not the core focus of this conversation. He has also proposed removing that and using the DataFusion Python bindings directly. I'm sure I'm forgetting things, but this email is long enough. Thanks everyone for the discussion thus far, and looking forward to more input on this. -Matt
