+1, Congrads on the near unanimous vote for progress. Btw, can somebody tell me what the change was from March when this was discussed and now? At that time, every one seem to have felt that Pig can only handle Hadoop as backend and doesn't make sense for it to become a TLP by itself. In fact, I remember a ticket to remove the possibility of a different backend. What did I miss?
1.) Technically, what developments/or future plans make it a separate project from Hadoop? (Other backend support?) 2.) What are the non-technical factors that changed since March that made this vote possible? (Donation from large company?) 3.) Can I make tax deductible contributions to the Apache Pig Project ? Alan Gates to pig-dev show details Mar 19 You have probably heard by now that there is a discussion going on in the Hadoop PMC as to whether a number of the subprojects (Hbase, Avro, Zookeeper, Hive, and Pig) should move out from under the Hadoop umbrella and become top level Apache projects (TLP). This discussion has picked up recently since the Apache board has clearly communicated to the Hadoop PMC that it is concerned that Hadoop is acting as an umbrella project with many disjoint subprojects underneath it. They are concerned that this gives Apache little insight into the health and happenings of the subproject communities which in turn means Apache cannot properly mentor those communities. The purpose of this email is to start a discussion within the Pig community about this topic. Let me cover first what becoming TLPwould mean for Pig, and then I'll go into what options I think we as a community have. Becoming a TLP would mean that Pig would itself have a PMC that would report directly to the Apache board. Who would be on the PMC would be something we as a community would need to decide. Common options would be to say all active committers are on the PMC, or all active committers who have been a committer for at least a year. We would also need to elect a chair of the PMC. This lucky person would have no additional power, but would have the additional responsibility of writing quarterly reports on Pig's status for Apache board meetings, as well as coordinating with Apache to get accounts for new committers, etc. For more information see http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html#roles Becoming a TLP would not mean that we are ostracized from the Hadoop community. We would continue to be invited to Hadoop Summits, HUGs, etc. Since all Pig developers and users are by definition Hadoop users, we would continue to be a strong presence in the Hadoop community. I see three ways that we as a community can respond to this: 1) Say yes, we want to be a TLP now. 2) Say yes, we want to be a TLP, but not yet. We feel we need more time to mature. If we choose this option we need to be able to clearly articulate how much time we need and what we hope to see change in that time. 3) Say no, we feel the benefits for us staying with Hadoop outweigh the drawbacks of being a disjoint subproject. If we choose this, we need to be able to say exactly what those benefits are and why we feel they will be compromised by leaving the Hadoop project. There may other options that I haven't thought of. Please feel free to suggest any you think of. Questions? Thoughts? Let the discussion begin. Alan. Reply Forward Reply Alan Gates to pig-dev show details Mar 31 So far I haven't seen any feedback on this. Apache has asked the Hadoop PMC to submit input in April on whether some subprojects should be promoted to TLPs. We, the Pig community, need to give feedback to the Hadoop PMC on how we feel about this. Please make your voice heard. So now I'll head my own call and give my thoughts on it. The biggest advantage I see to being a TLP is a direct connection to Apache. Right now all of the Pig team's interaction with Apache is through the Hadoop PMC. Being directly connected to Apache would benefit Pig team members who would have a better view into Apache. It would also raise our profile in Apache and thus make other projects more aware of us. However, I am concerned about loosing Pig's explicit connection to Hadoop. This concern has a couple of dimensions. One, Hadoop and MapReduce are the current flavor of the month in computing. Given that Pig shares a name with the common farm animal, it's hard to be sure based on search statistics. But Google trends shows that "hadoop" is searched on much more frequently than "hadoop pig" or "apache pig" (see http://www.google.com/trends?q=hadoop%2Chadoop+pig). I am guessing that most Pig users come from Hadoop users who discover Pig via Hadoop's website. Loosing that subproject tab on Hadoop's front page may radically lower the number of users coming to Pig to check out our project. I would argue that this benefits Hadoop as well, since high level languages like Pig Latin have the potential to greatly extend the user base and usability of Hadoop. Two, being explicitly connected to Hadoop keeps our two communities aware of each others needs. There are features proposed for MR that would greatly help Pig. By staying in the Hadoop community Pig is better positioned to advocate for and help implement and test those features. The response to this will be that Pig developers can still subscribe to Hadoop mailing lists, submit patches, etc. That is, they can still be part of the Hadoop community. Which reinforces my point that it makes more sense to leave Pig in the Hadoop community since Pig developers will need to be part of that community anyway. Finally, philosophically it makes sense to me that projects that are tightly connected belong together. It strikes me as strange to have Pig as a TLP completely dependent on another TLP. Hadoop was originally a subproject of Lucene. It moved out to be a TLP when it became obvious that Hadoop had become independent of and useful apart from Lucene. Pig is not in that position relative to Hadoop. So, I'm -1 on Pig moving out. But this is a soft -1. I'm open to being persuaded that I'm wrong or my concerns can be addressed while still having Pig as a TLP. Alan. - Show quoted text - Reply Forward Reply Dmitriy Ryaboy to pig-dev show details Mar 31 Over time, Pig is increasing its coupling to Hadoop (for good reasons), rather than decreasing it. If and when Pig becomes a viable entity without hadoop around, it might make sense as a TLP. As is, I think becoming a TLP will only introduce unnecessary administrative and bureaucratic headaches. So my vote is also -1. -Dmitriy - Show quoted text - Reply Forward Invite Dmitriy Ryaboy to chat Reply Thejas Nair to pig-dev, Dmitriy show details Apr 2 I agree with Alan and Dmitriy - Pig is tightly coupled with hadoop, and heavily influenced by its roadmap. I think it makes sense to continue as a sub-project of hadoop. -Thejas - Show quoted text - Reply Reply to all Forward Reply Santhosh Srinivasan to pig-dev, Dmitriy show details Apr 3 I see this as a multi-part question. Looking back at some of the significant roadmap/existential questions asked in the last 12 months, I see the following: 1. With the introduction of SQL, what is the philosophy of Pig (I sent an email about this approximately 9 months ago) 2. What is the approach to support backward compatibility in Pig (Alan had sent an email about this 3 months ago) 3. Should Pig be a TLP (the current email thread). Here is my take on answering the aforementioned questions. The initial philosophy of Pig was to be backend agnostic. It was designed as a data flow language. Whenever a new language is designed, the syntax and semantics of the language have to be laid out. The syntax is usually captured in the form of a BNF grammar. The semantics are defined by the language creators. Backward compatibility is then a question of holding true to the syntax and semantics. With Pig, in addition to the language, the Java APIs were exposed to customers to implement UDFs (load/store/filter/grouping/row transformation etc), provision looping since the language does not support looping constructs and also support a programmatic mode of access. Backward compatibility in this context is to support API versioning. Do we still intend to position as a data flow language that is backend agnostic? If the answer is yes, then there is a strong case for making Pig a TLP. Are we influenced by Hadoop? A big YES! The reason Pig chose to become a Hadoop sub-project was to ride the Hadoop popularity wave. As a consequence, we chose to be heavily influenced by the Hadoop roadmap. Like a good lawyer, I also have rebuttals to Alan's questions :) 1. Search engine popularity - We can discuss this with the Hadoop team and still retain links to TLP's that are coupled (loosely or tightly). 2. Explicit connection to Hadoop - I see this as logical connection v/s physical connection. Today, we are physically connected as a sub-project. Becoming a TLP, will not increase/decrease our influence on the Hadoop community (think Logical, Physical and MR Layers :) 3. Philosophy - I have already talked about this. The tight coupling is by choice. If Pig continues to be a data flow language with clear syntax and semantics then someone can implement Pig on top of a different backend. Do we intend to take this approach? I just wanted to offer a different opinion to this thread. I strongly believe that we should think about the original philosophy. Will we have a Pig standards committee that will decide on the changes to the language (think C/C++) if there are multiple backend implementations? I will reserve my vote based on the outcome of the philosophy and backward compatibility discussions. If we decide that Pig will be treated and maintained like a true language with clear syntax and semantics then we have a strong case to make it into a TLP. If not, we should retain our existing ties to Hadoop and make Pig into a data flow language for Hadoop. Santhosh - Show quoted text - Reply Reply to all Forward Reply Ashutosh Chauhan to pig-dev show details Apr 4 I concur with Santhosh here. I think main question we need to answer here is how close our ties are with Hadoop currently and how it will be in future ? When Pig was originally designed the intent was to keep it backend neutral, so much so that there was a reference backend implementation (also known as local engine) which had nothing to do with Hadoop. But things have changed since then. Hadoop's local mode is adopted in favor of Pig's own local mode. We have moved from being backend agnostic to hadoop favoring. And while this was happening, it seems we tried to keep Pig Latin language independent of hadoop backend while Pig runtime started to make use of hadoop concepts. Apart from design decisions, this move also has a practical impact on our codebase. Since we adopted Hadoop more closely, we got rid of an extra layer of abstraction and instead started using similar abstractions already existing in Hadoop. This has a positive impact that it simplified the codebase and provides tighter integration with Hadoop. So, if we are continuing in a direction where Hadoop is our only backend (or atleast a favored one), close ties to Hadoop are useful because of the reasons Alan and Dmitriy pointed out. if not, then I think moving out to TLP makes sense. Since, there is no efforts which I am aware of, is trying to plug in a different backend for Pig, I think maintaining close ties with Hadoop is useful for Pig. In future when there is a different distributed computing platform comes up which we want to use as backend, we can revisit our decision. So, as for things stand today I am -1 to move out of Hadoop. And I would also like to reiterate my point that though Pig runtime may continue to get closer to Hadoop, we shall keep Pig Latin completely backend agnostic. Ashutosh - Show quoted text - Reply Forward Invite Ashutosh Chauhan to chat Reply hc busy to pig-dev show details Apr 5 This is awesome!!! As much as I hate PJM's for wasting time at all the places that I've worked at, I think formalizing the management group(PMC) to openly and clearly determine feature roadmap and dev schedule is the best thing pig can have. I once commented to my co-worker (also heavy pig user) that pig's organization (with all due respect to all you hardworking people) is like a pigsty! documentations all over the place, javadocs from three versions ago, much of the documentation doesn't match actual features... links to the download page is broken. If you look at cascading's website... it's so much cleaner. (Of course... we still use pig because it works well) I think as TLP, pig will receive better marketing and better support in a way that will propel it both in popularity and in the amount of support it receives. As a user, that change will be good for me. - Show quoted text - Reply Forward Reply Pradeep Kamath to pig-dev show details Apr 5 I agree with Ashutosh and Santhosh. Just based on the current direction of the project I think we are more closely tied with Hadoop now (with Pig 0.7, our load/store interfaces are very closely tied with Hadoop) - hence for now my vote would be a -1 to be a TLP - if there is change in that direction/philosophy to be really backend agnostic I think we should revisit this question. Pradeep -----Original Message----- From: Ashutosh Chauhan [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, April 04, 2010 11:11 PM To: [email protected] - Show quoted text - Reply Forward Reply Alan Gates to pig-dev show details Apr 5 I agree that Pig's code documentation is in sad shape. I think our user documentation for each release is good, of limited. I hope that our documents on wiki (such as PigJournal) help people understand our roadmap. Please let us know if you disagree so we can find ways to improve it. That said, it isn't clear to me how Pig being a TLP will solve that. The current committers or some subset thereof (see original message) would become the PMC. Other than having expanded powers to vote on releases and who becomes new committers, the role of these new PMC members would not change much. They won't have anymore time to address documentation and communication issues. We need to find a way to address those no matter what governance framework or community Pig is in. Alan. - Show quoted text - Reply Forward Reply Alan Gates to pig-dev show details Apr 5 Prognostication is a difficult business. Of course I'd love it if someday there is an ISO Pig Latin committee (with meetings in cool exotic places) deciding the official standard for Pig Latin. But that seems like saying in your start up's business plan, "When we reach Google's size, then we'll do x". If there ever is an ISO Pig Latin standard it will be years off. As others have noted, staying tight to Hadoop now has many advantages, both in technical and adoption terms. Hence my advocacy of keeping Pig Latin Hadoop agnostic while tightly integrating the backend. Which is to say that in my view, Pig is Hadoop specific now, but there may come a day when that is no longer true. Whether Pig will ever move past just running on Hadoop to running in other parallel systems won't be known for years to come. Given that, do you think it makes sense to say that Pig stays a subproject for now, but if it someday grows beyond Hadoop only it becomes a TLP? I could agree to that stance. Alan. - Show quoted text - Reply Forward Reply hc busy to pig-dev show details Apr 5 I guess this is more of a suggestion for roadmap than TLP discussion, I think the PMC/committers can create a dedicate position what maintains the web/doc's. Somebody who yell and screams until the doc's are in sync with the implementation before the release. Because TLP is an elevation of status in addition to internal re-organization. I think it might to create the PR needed to attract the talents to fill in that job... - Show quoted text - Reply Forward Reply hc busy to pig-dev show details Apr 5 > Of course I'd love it if someday there is an ISO Pig Latin committee (with meetings in cool exotic places) deciding the official standard for Pig Latin. haha!!! Some exotic place like Yahoo's HQ in sunny Sunnyvale California? I guess it feels like it depends on the roadmap more than roadmap depends on it. In terms of positioning, a TLP would appear to potential users who are evaluating alternatives to consider it as _the_ choice as opposed to one of the choices. If the ambition is to take it there, then TLP, as useless as it may seem right now, might actually be worth the effort to attain. I mean, would you rather wait until Hive makes TLP and then play catch up? I mean, I can kinda see them doing that... - Show quoted text - Reply Forward Reply Dmitriy Ryaboy to pig-dev show details Apr 5 The Twitter office is cushier and has more bars within stumbling distance. Just sayin'. To the subject at hand -- I don't think TLP standing has the PR value you think it does... feature set, velocity of development, adoption, flexibility, etc -- those are far more important. -Dmitriy - Show quoted text - Reply Forward Invite Dmitriy Ryaboy to chat Reply Santhosh Srinivasan to pig-dev show details Apr 5 "Given that, do you think it makes sense to say that Pig stays a subproject for now, but if it someday grows beyond Hadoop only it becomes a TLP? I could agree to that stance." Bingo! Santhosh -----Original Message----- From: Alan Gates [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, April 05, 2010 11:37 AM To: [email protected] - Show quoted text - Reply Forward Reply hc busy to pig-dev show details Apr 5 >The Twitter office is cushier and has more bars within stumbling distance. Just sayin'. and strip clubs too, I gather there're a couple on Market... near civic bart stop ;-) oh... hey, you guys are at a nice place... lot's of night clubs near there too . > "Given that, do you think it makes sense to say that Pig stays a subproject for now, but if it someday grows beyond Hadoop only it becomes a TLP? I could agree to that stance." Oops, I didn't read your whole message... I think TLP could be part of the roadmap: Planned publicity, like planned pregnancy, is a good thing. And on the way there, we should add dedicated resource that updates documentation and links on the website... :-) - Show quoted text - Reply Forward Reply Daniel Dai to pig-dev show details Apr 5 I agree with the stance that we remain in Hadoop until we see more compelling reasons, such as Pig go beyond Hadoop happens. Currently I cannot fully weight the advantage and disadvantage of becoming a TLP. But provides this is a point of no return, I don't want to move unless we do have a strong motivation. We can always choose to become TLP later when we feel more convinced to that. Daniel -------------------------------------------------- From: "Santhosh Srinivasan" <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, April 05, 2010 12:22 PM To: <[email protected]> Subject: RE: Begin a discussion about Pig as a top level project - Show quoted text - Reply Forward Invite Daniel Dai to chat On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 9:46 PM, Anant Wadhokar <[email protected]> wrote: > +1 > > On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 12:04 AM, Olga Natkovich <[email protected] > >wrote: > > > +1 > > > > > From: Alan Gates <[email protected]> > > > Date: August 23, 2010 10:38:12 AM PDT > > > To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> > > > Subject: [VOTE] Pig to become a TLP > > > Reply-To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> > > > > > > I propose that Pig become a top level Apache project. > > > > > > The Pig development community has already voted on and approved this > > > proposal. In summary, the community voted that all current active > > > committers (listed at http://hadoop.apache.org/pig/whoweare.html ) as > > > of August 18 2010 should become PMC members, and that Olga Natkovich > > > should be the PMC chair. They also agreed that adopting bylaws should > > > be among the first tasks of the new PMC. Full details of the vote can > > > be seen at http://bit.ly/c3GDyl > > > > > > Please vote on sending this proposal to the Apache Board. > > > > > > Below is a draft resolution to be sent to the Apache Board: > > > > > > Establish the Apache Pig Project > > > > > > WHEREAS, the Board of Directors deems it to be in the best > > > interests of the Foundation and consistent with the > > > Foundation's purpose to establish a Project Management > > > Committee charged with the creation and maintenance of > > > open-source software related to parallel analysis of large > > > data sets for distribution at no charge to the public. > > > > > > NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that a Project Management > > > Committee (PMC), to be known as the "Apache Pig Project", > > > be and hereby is established pursuant to Bylaws of the > > > Foundation; and be it further > > > > > > RESOLVED, that the Apache Pig Project be and hereby is > > > responsible for the creation and maintenance of software > > > related to parallel analysis of large data sets; and be > > > it further > > > > > > RESOLVED, that the office of "Vice President, Apache Pig" be > > > and hereby is created, the person holding such office to > > > serve at the direction of the Board of Directors as the chair > > > of the Apache Pig Project, and to have primary responsibility > > > for management of the projects within the scope of > > > responsibility of the Apache Pig Project; and be it further > > > > > > RESOLVED, that the persons listed immediately below be and > > > hereby are appointed to serve as the initial members of the > > > Apache Pig Project: > > > > > > * Benjamin Reed <[email protected]> > > > * Daniel Dai <[email protected]> > > > * Alan Gates <[email protected]> > > > * Giridharen Kesavan <[email protected]> > > > * Olga Natkovich <[email protected]> > > > * Pradeep Kamath <[email protected]> > > > * Santhosh Srinivasan <[email protected]> > > > * Yan Zhou <[email protected]> > > > * Jeff Zhang <[email protected]> > > > * Ashutosh Chauhan <[email protected]> > > > * Richard Ding <[email protected]> > > > * Dmitriy Ryaboy <[email protected]> > > > * Thejas Nair <[email protected]> > > > > > > NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Olga Natkovich > > > be appointed to the office of Vice President, Apache Pig, to > > > serve in accordance with and subject to the direction of the > > > Board of Directors and the Bylaws of the Foundation until > > > death, resignation, retirement, removal or disqualification, > > > or until a successor is appointed; and be it further > > > > > > RESOLVED, that the initial Apache Pig PMC be and hereby is > > > tasked with the creation of a set of bylaws intended to > > > encourage open development and increased participation in the > > > Apache Pig Project; and be it further > > > > > > RESOLVED, that the Apache Pig Project be and hereby > > > is tasked with the migration and rationalization of the Apache > > > Hadoop Pig sub-project; and be it further > > > > > > RESOLVED, that all responsibilities pertaining to the Apache > > > Hadoop Pig sub-project encumbered upon the > > > Apache Hadoop Project are hereafter discharged. > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > >
