If the vote description was ambiguous and prone to confusion, then a
better-formulated vote should be started instead of trying to bring
clarification and build consensus in the vote thread, IMHO.
I also agree with Micah that there are still details to clarify, so a
vote sounds a bit prematurate to me.
For example, what does "a community vote to close and adopt each major
version": is it about choosing when we freeze the version? or about
which pending features we decide to include in it? are we envisioning a
situation where we defer a feature to version N+1 for some reasons?
(personally, I'd like to avoid creating a process where the set of
features in a Parquet format version is prone to negotiations between
stakeholders)
Therefore, I'm -1 because this proposal looks more like a PoC at the
moment (sorry!).
Regards
Antoine.
Le 08/07/2026 à 02:33, Micah Kornfield a écrit :
Hi Ryan,
Micah, did you mean -0 to ask for clarification? It doesn't sound like you
object to any of the specifics that I listed but would like more details
about versioning the parquet-format artifact?
I intended -1 initially because I read the vote as being prescriptive of
the process for both versioning and releases. If this vote is simply to
close out the "version
versus "preset" debate then I'm +1 on using versions as the primary way we
recommend writers group changes and a general baseline [1] for what we
recommend expect readers to support. Ryan, is this a correct
interpretation of what we are voting on?
Given the rest of the thread and other responses, I think there is still
some amount of details to work through. As noted by my questions and
request for a more detailed PR proposal on concrete process changes. If
those are coming then great. If we are aligned on what this vote is about
above, from my perspective we can move into more depth into those
discussions. [2] is an example of how this could work, there might be
other alternatives.
Antoine, given the scope of vote outlined above do you still have
reservations?
But keep in mind
that the way spec versions evolve is not the same as how software APIs
evolve so "semver" has to be reinterpreted -- let's use a separate thread
for this discussion since these choices are orthogonal to what we are
confirming with this vote
A side thread was already started here:
https://lists.apache.org/thread/qc031s9vp07bpkrvlnz3v3gn0qhn5l91
Thanks,
Micah
[1] This is specifically a general baseline because I think there are
several short-comings of relying on version number as gate for readers.
[2] https://github.com/apache/parquet-format/pull/588
On Tue, Jul 7, 2026 at 12:07 PM Ryan Blue <[email protected]> wrote:
+1 (binding) from me, and I'll also take a minute to reply to clarify the
vote in response to Micah.
---
Micah, did you mean -0 to ask for clarification? It doesn't sound like you
object to any of the specifics that I listed but would like more details
about versioning the parquet-format artifact?
This vote addresses what I called out as the contentious issues in the
other thread a couple weeks ago: how to create and release feature bundles
and how to label them. I called these out in the vote summary as "targeted
at the next major version" (labeling) and "community vote to close and
adopt each major version".
The reason I call out "major version" is that it is the main decision
point. We can definitely use minor or patch version numbers, but the focus
here is on forward-incompatible changes that result in a major version
bump. Minor version changes, by definition, do not break forward
compatibility, so they aren't actually part of compatibility level checks
although they may be useful for other purposes. Only the major version
defines a compatibility level (outlined by Alkis' email).
The first 3 specific questions in Micah's reply are mostly about how to map
the major version compatibility level to parquet-format releases. I don't
want to get too distracted by artifact versioning, since the main thing is
how we deal with breaking spec changes (accumulate them and vote to release
them as a group). I think there's a reasonable mapping to Parquet format
release numbers, like bumping the minor version when we add a compatible
change. This is actually the _current_ versioning scheme! But keep in mind
that the way spec versions evolve is not the same as how software APIs
evolve so "semver" has to be reinterpreted -- let's use a separate thread
for this discussion since these choices are orthogonal to what we are
confirming with this vote: that we will use major version for incompatible
changes.
What are the criteria for closing a major format version?
I think that the vote would be decided by consensus, not a majority.
On Mon, Jul 6, 2026 at 10:21 PM Micah Kornfield <[email protected]>
wrote:
-1. I'm not actually sure what the practical outcome of this vote means.
I agree from a feature grouping perspective using the parquet format
version release makes sense. I don't agree it should be a single number
(this doesn't account for forward compatible changes that a writer might
not want to enable immediately, e.g. new sort orders).
A way of addressing this Ryan is if you could you post a PR modifying
https://github.com/apache/parquet-format/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md to
what the actual change in process is, so we can vote on that?
Open questions in my mind are:
* Will the community vote be separate from a major/minor release of the
format?
* Are we going to maintain two branches of the format or something else?
* Are we going to block breaking changes from being merged and delay
major
release of the format?
* What are the criteria for closing a major format version?
If some of these fall in later parts of the conversation, then they don't
need to be included in the PR.
Thanks,
Micah
On Mon, Jul 6, 2026 at 4:53 PM Ryan Blue <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi everyone,
This is a vote to conclude the discussion about the future of Parquet
versioning. We’ve reached the end of that discussion thread and there
is
a
clear preference in the community for using increasing version numbers
to
release forward-incompatible changes.
This vote is to confirm the choice to use version numbers.
Specifically,
- We will accumulate forward-incompatible changes targeted at the
next
major version of the Parquet spec (3, 4, etc.)
- New forward-incompatible changes will automatically go into the
next
major version
- We will have a community vote to close and adopt each major
version
If you’re familiar with Iceberg, this is what we’ve referred to as the
“Iceberg model” (although we inherited it from Parquet).
Please vote in the next 72 hours:
[ ] +1: Adopt versions for forward-incompatible changes
[ ] +0: Not going to block, but prefer . . .
[ ] -1: Do not adopt versions for forward-incompatible changes because
.
.
.
Glad to see this moving forward!
Ryan
