Hey, sorry I'm late in responding to this. Getting back to Japan,
catching up and jetlag...
I think the state of documentation now is definitely a lot better.
Right now there are a couple of difficult issues:
- There is still the ghost of OG hanging around... Nobody really
supports it much(a lot of the committers now, including me, haven't
actually used it or lookd at the code much).
- The majority of current committers are from cloudera(nothing wrong
with it, just historical). Outsiders can feel there may be pressure to
align with them, even though there really isn't some kind of groupthink
as one might be concerned from a single organisation.
- There's a catch22 with usage and visibility. A lot of more visible
organisations don't want to use something still in the incubator, so
there is less visibility, attracting fewer people.
- I actually think most of the more pressing issues with flume are more
or less sorted now. When I started contributing, there was some big
holes I was worried about and wanted to help fix. Now most of the work
to be done is less "interesting" and generally adding polish.
I'm not entirely sure about solutions to a lot of these problems.
One thing that could be good is having more documentation on developing
plugins, as well as encouraging contribution of such plugins to get
people involved?
On 05/25/2012 02:29 AM, Eric Sammer wrote:
Flume'ers:
Flume has been progressing wonderfully as an ASF Incubator project lately
in terms of community activity, code, releases, and even docs (gasp!). One
of the requirements for graduation (to a top level project, or TLP) is
committer diversity. In other words, committers should come from a variety
of backgrounds and, specifically, not from a single employer. We happen to
have a large number of Cloudera employees, mostly because that's where
Flume came from, historically. The discussion I wanted to start with
everyone was, what, if anything, can we do to help folks dive into Flume
and begin contributing[1]?
Thanks!
[1] Remember that contributions come in forms other than code (docs, site
maintenance / design / logos, testing) although code is fantastic!
