On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 3:39 AM, Dmitriy Lyubimov (JIRA) <[email protected]> wrote: > bq. The emotional tenor of Dmitriy Lyubimov's comments are exactly what is > encouraging the h2o work to be done a bit apart. It simply isn't efficient to > have to answer so many off-topic points whenever any reports on work in > progress are given. > > I think this has been the off-topic here. > > Calling my comments "emotional" or "non-technical", or _loosely_ paraphrasing > me.
Yes, the personal finger-pointing parts don't belong and don't convince anyone, let's skip those. >From the sidelines, I see a bunch of work intended for Mahout proceeding outside the community such as it is, and even Apache. Of course, contributions are always prepped externally to some degree. I create, debug, change patches before posting them, maybe checking in early on choices that others may want input on. This is a large-ish change being proposed, IIUC. I can see one person who publicly, and at least two who privately, have clear reservations about this direction. It certainly appears funny vis-a-vis the "Apache way" to work on a contribution *because* one (or more) other committers aren't convinced. I don't think that's important to dither about. What is, is this: if a big-bang patch landed tomorrow, I wonder if it would pass a VOTE? Nobody can pre-judge his/her opinion on a proposal that's not tabled yet, but it seems like a quite possible outcome. Would be a shame to do a lot of work, intending it for a commit, and then find there is not consensus. So is it better to figure out earlier than later whether these 2+ parallel tracks have enough commonality to coexist? is there anything to VOTE on? is there any baby-step change that everyone agrees on that unifies the efforts? Tangent: A post to the incubator list yesterday noted that many new incubator projects overlapped a whole lot with other projects. Redundancy is OK per se; Apache has no "product portfolio" to rationalize. But if people are finding it easier to set up a new separate project rather than try to participate in an existing one, that's bad for communities. I am not so against new projects. Let a thousand flowers bloom and see which survive. There's already a powerful incentive to join forces to gain critical mass. Are there really separate projects here? there may not be much overlap anyway! Would it be better to model it that way? what about Apache H2O incubating? what about Apache, um, "Spathi" incubating or something for the Spark + Math efforts? It's almost less confusing to treat either of these as "Mahout 2" as they are quite different from the just-retired codebase. Put another way: if any such effort could *not* be an incubating project, can it really be the replacement future for Mahout? or do these need to start again in the incubator?
