On Nov 1, 2010, at 3:09 PM, Sean Owen wrote: > I agree. There are not necessarily 6 release before 1.0, and, I suspect it's > definitely not more than 2 -- I sure don't imagine an 0.6 myself.
+1. I think we could get to 1.0 soon. > > (Hadoop's version scheme notwithstanding,) I think 1.0 means many things, > including "we think this meets Joe Developer's expectations for production > ready software". > > This means good evidence of no medium- or large-sized bugs, fairly good > consistency across the API, fairly good tests and docs. Most significantly, > it means some strong commitment to not change or remove APIs without > warning. Agreed. > It also probably means that there isn't significantly more to come > in Mahout, that what it is at 1.0 is what it will be for a few years. It has > to be treated as something tens of thousands of people depend on now, and > more as soon as they know they can depend on it. I'm not sure I would word it that way. A few years is a long time. In the span of two years Lucene has seen improvements of upwards of 10-50x in terms of indexing and search speed. You simply never know where innovation is coming from. This is why you have branches such as trunk, 1.X, etc. and you back port, but to say we will be on 1.x for years to come is a very bad thing, IMO. > > The bad news is that this implies a good amount of grunt work ahead. I > personally believe we need to shift modes, away from thinking of the project > as an open bazaar of good beginnings of ideas and implementations, away from > "seeing what sticks", and towards polishing what's "stuck" already into > coherent and consistent modules. It may mean we have to throw away some > unsupported, deprecated code, Hmmm. I hope no one just decides they think they know what they can throw away. I'm all for deprecation, but to me deprecation is about changes to APIs. I don't know that we should throw away algorithms. People can simply choose not to use them. Open source is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Sometimes it just takes a while for people to realize it is useful to them. Does that mean we should never throw things away? Of course not. It just means we need to think about and discuss it. > or turn away new code more aggressively that's > not a fit. I don't agree we should "aggressively" turn away code. It simply isn't how open source works. Community over code. There is no crystal ball here and you simply never know where the next good idea is going to come from unless you let things ruminate. We may not commit it right away or we may encourage the contributor to flesh it out more, but turn away is not the right attitude, IMO. Open source is about scratching your itch and it's about innovation coming from the seeming middle of nowhere. Does that introduce some chaos? Yes. Does it make for better code in the long run? Absolutely. -Grant
