I can see a lot of value in having a distribution of storm that comes with batteries included, everything is tested together and you know it works. But I don’t see much long term developer benefit in building them all together. If there is strong coupling between storm and these external projects so that they break when storm changes then we need to understand the coupling and decide if we want to reduce that coupling by stabilizing APIs, improving version numbering and release process, etc.; or if the functionality is something that should be offered as a base service in storm.
I can see politically the value of giving these other projects a home in Apache, and making them sub-projects is the simplest route to that. I’d love to have storm on yarn inside Apache. I just don’t want to go overboard with it. There was a time when HBase was a “contrib” module under Hadoop along with a lot of other things, and the Apache board came and told Hadoop to brake it up. Bringing storm-kafka into storm does not sound like it will solve much from a developer’s perspective, because there is at least as much coupling with kafka as there is with storm. I can see how it is a huge amount of overhead and pain to set up a new project just for a few hundred lines of code, as such I am in favor of pulling in closely related projects, especially those that are spouts and state implementations. I just want to be sure that we do it carefully, with a good reason, and with enough people who are familiar with the code to support it long term. If it starts to look like we are pulling in too many projects perhaps we should look at something more like the bigtop project https://bigtop.apache.org/ which produces a tested distribution of Hadoop with many different sub-projects included in it. I am also a bit concerned about these sub-projects becoming second class citizens, where we break something, but because the build is off by default we don’t know it. I would prefer that they are built and tested by default. If the build and test time starts to take too long, to me that means we need to start wondering if we have too many contrib modules. —Bobby From: Brian Enochson <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Reply-To: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: Tuesday, February 25, 2014 at 9:50 PM To: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Cc: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: Re: [DISCUSS] Pulling "Contrib" Modules into Apache hi, I am in agreement with Taylor and believe I understand his intent. An incredible tool/framework/application like Storm is only enhanced and gains value from the number of well maintained and vetted modules that can be used for integration and adding further functionality. I am relatively new to the Storm community but have spent quite some time reviewing contributing modules out there, reviewing various duplicates and running into some version incompatibilities. I understand the need to keep Storm itself pure, but do think there needs to be some structure and governance added to the contributing modules. Look at the benefit a tool like npm brings to the node community. I like the idea of sponsorship, vetting and a community vote. I, as sure many would be, am willing to offer support and time to working through how to set this up and helping with the implementation if it is decided to pursue some solution. I hope these views are taken in the sprit they are made, to make this incredible system even better along with the surrounding eco-system. Thanks, Brian On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 9:36 PM, P. Taylor Goetz <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Just to be clear (and play a little Devil’s advocate :) ), I’m not suggesting that whatever a “contrib” project/module/subproject might become, be a clearinghouse for anything Storm-related. I see it as something that is well-vetted by the Storm community, subject to PPMC review, vote, etc. Entry would require community review, PPMC review, and in some cases ASF IP clearance/legal review. Anything added would require some level of commitment from the PPMC/committers to provide some level of support. In other words, nothing “willy-nilly”. One option could be that any module added require (X > 0) number of committers to volunteer as “sponsor”s for the module, and commit to maintaining it. That being said, I don’t see storm-kafka being any different from anything else that provides integration points for Storm. -Taylor On Feb 25, 2014, at 7:53 PM, Nathan Marz <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: I'm only +1 for pulling in storm-kafka and updating it. Other projects put these contrib modules in a "contrib" folder and keep them managed as completely separate codebases. As it's not actually a "module" necessary for Storm, there's an argument there for doing it that way rather than via the multi-module route. On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 4:39 PM, Milinda Pathirage <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi Taylor, I'm +1 for pulling these external libraries into Apache codebase. This will certainly benifit Strom community. I also like to contribute to this process. Thanks Milinda On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 5:28 PM, P. Taylor Goetz <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > A while back I opened STORM-206 [1] to capture ideas for pulling in > "contrib" modules to the Apache codebase. > > In the past, we had the storm-contrib github project [2] which subsequently > got broken up into individual projects hosted on the stormprocessor github > group [3] and elsewhere. > > The problem with this approach is that in certain cases it led to code rot > (modules not being updated in step with Storm's API), fragmentation > (multiple similar modules with the same name), and confusion. > > A good example of this is the storm-kafka module [4], since it is a widely > used component. Because storm-contrib wasn't being tagged in github, a lot > of users had trouble reconciling with which versions of storm it was > compatible. Some users built off specific commit hashes, some forked, and a > few even pushed custom builds to repositories such as clojars. With kafka > 0.8 now available, there are two main storm-kafka projects, the original > (compatible with kafka 0.7) and an updated fork [5] (compatible with kafka > 0.8). > > My intention is not to find fault in any way, but rather to point out the > resulting pain, and work toward a better solution. > > I think it would be beneficial to the Storm user community to have certain > commonly used modules like storm-kafka brought into the Apache Storm > project. Another benefit worth considering is the licensing/legal oversight > that the ASF provides, which is important to many users. > > If this is something we want to do, then the big question becomes what sort > governance process needs to be established to ensure that such things are > properly maintained. > > Some random thoughts, questions, etc. that jump to mind include: > > What to call these things: "contib modules", "connectors", "integration > modules", etc.? > Build integration: I imagine they would be a multi-module submodule of the > main maven build. Probably turned off by default and enabled by a maven > profile. > Governance: Have one or more committer volunteers responsible for > maintenance, merging patches, etc.? Proposal process for pulling new > modules? > > > I look forward to hearing others' opinions. > > - Taylor > > > [1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/STORM-206 > [2] https://github.com/nathanmarz/storm-contrib > [3] https://github.com/stormprocessor > [4] https://github.com/nathanmarz/storm-contrib/tree/master/storm-kafka > [5] https://github.com/wurstmeister/storm-kafka-0.8-plus -- Milinda Pathirage PhD Student | Research Assistant School of Informatics and Computing | Data to Insight Center Indiana University twitter: milindalakmal skype: milinda.pathirage blog: http://milinda.pathirage.org<http://milinda.pathirage.org/> -- Twitter: @nathanmarz http://nathanmarz.com<http://nathanmarz.com/>
