Hi,
As a mentor of the project (not from the beginning) and to have been a
mentor of other projects in the ASF, I also think that the project is
ready to Graduate.
The project is very active and there is a lot of discussion in the
mailing list. Even if people are not always agreed, the discussions are
safe and it's good to have these kind of threads on the mailing list.
There is also new committers that is also a good thing.
regards,
François
[email protected]
[email protected]
Le 17/01/2026 à 21:16, Russell Spitzer a écrit :
Hi y’all,
It’s exciting to see how far the Apache Polaris (Incubating) project has
come in just over a year, and I think it’s time that we start considering
whether the podling is ready to graduate to a full-fledged Apache project.
We’ve seen production releases, new persistence backends, OPA support, and
so much more. Most importantly, this work has been done with public design
and discussion, following the Apache model for community development.
Github Issues and PR review happen in an open and vendor-neutral manner.
There are many active committers and PPMC members from different
organizations working together and releasing quality software. I’ve seen
solid work done to protect the Apache Brand and ensure licensing is
appropriate, as well as some great handling of public events. Even as a
young project, Polaris has already hosted many successful meetups and has
been the subject of talks at a variety of conferences. We also have a
lively dev-list and lots of one-on-one discussions happening on the Slack
channel. In many cases, I think that the Apache Polaris Community is
functioning exactly how a top-level Apache project should
<https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/INCUBATOR/Graduation+Criteria>.
For those interested in the statistics
-
Apache Polaris has had 6 Releases (0.9, 1.0.0, 1.0.1, 1.1.0, 1.2.0,
1.3.0)
-
Our github is at 1.8k stars with 357 Forks
-
We have closed 2819 PRs
-
There are have been ~100 Contributors to the project
-
The PPMC has 13 Members (6 elected during incubation period) and there
are 8 other committers (5 elected during incubation period)
-
Representatives from Dremio, Snowflake, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, And
more!
That said, I do still have some concerns about other areas of community
development. While I think we are having lots of great conversations about
the future of the project, we still seem to have difficult moments where
communication appears to be breaking down, and people are becoming a bit
more heated. We also seem to be lacking a bit of mutual trust and respect.
I want to make sure that the Polaris community is a welcoming one, where
engineers all respect each other’s contributions and, most importantly, act
in good faith. We’ve seen some instances where PRs may be perceived as
merged prematurely, or that there are double standards for what constitutes
a “blocker” on a PR. I want to know if others in the community feel this
way, and more importantly, if there are any constructive ideas on how to
help us get along and make the community as welcoming as possible. Please
do not take this lightly; I know it can be easy to just write off other
engineers as a “problem,” but that kind of attitude won’t help this project
move forward. I would encourage everyone to think about how they personally
can contribute to a better environment. If I’m alone in this sentiment,
feel free to ignore me, but I think it’s always a good exercise to think
about how I interact with others to make them feel as welcome as possible.
I don’t mean to be all gloomy on this matter, though; I think some things
have been moving in the right direction. A great example is some of the
discussions we’ve seen lately on the mailing list. Although we had some
disagreements on a PR, there is now a pretty constructive dialogue
happening where I do feel like all of the community members are trying to
find common ground and listen to each other’s viewpoints without personal
judgment. This shows me that we are still having constructive engagements
even when there was prior disagreement. I wasn’t able to attend the recent
sprint planning meeting, but from what I have heard, that’s another
instance where it feels like folks came away from that meeting with a bit
more camaraderie than they had going in.
All in all, I want what’s best for the community. I hope that by bringing
up graduation, and bringing some of my concerns into the public light,
we’ll be able to make progress and graduate the project. I want to know
everyone else’s feelings on the general maturity of the project, whether
they think it’s appropriate to graduate, and whether they have any other
suggestions for paths forward to make Polaris even better in the future.
Thanks for your time,
Russell Spitzer
Resources:
https://incubator.apache.org/guides/graduation.html
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/INCUBATOR/Graduation+Criteria
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qBIxClspQA--uQB0MS3LQO-uEDjdXtbqMPSRNbgeKdk/edit?usp=sharing
