Hi Mahouters,
I'd like to suggest we start gearing up for a 0.1 release. Since this
is our first one, we're going to have a bit of extra work to get
things in the right shape, so any extra time you have would be most
appreciated.
First and foremost, would be testing, etc. on the current trunk
(assuming SVN is up, which it doesn't appear to be right now) and
providing feedback on what's good and bad. This is especially true of
people who have access to clusters (which many of us committers will
soon have thanks to a kind donation by Amazon.)
Second, we should go through JIRA and (un)mark issues in JIRA as
either in or out of 0.1 or closed. See https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MAHOUT/fixforversion/12312976
Of these, MAHOUT-9, 56 and 60 are all pretty much done, they just
need a bit more documentation. M-54 looks like it could be closed,
right Jeff, as the reporter hasn't responded to questions, etc.? So,
if you have something you think should be in 0.1, please go mark it as
such in JIRA.
Next, we need to address https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/
MAHOUT-69, at a minimum. One of us should look at other ASF projects
(Lucene/Solr) and grab their "How To Make a Release" documentation (on
the wiki) and put it up on our wiki. Volunteers?
After that, I'd suggest we are ready for a release. Typically, we
call a "freeze" date, and then we release a series of release
candidates. For Mahout, since we are so young and this is such an
early release, I don't think we need to obsess too much over this.
Our APIs are likely to change in the future, so we should just keep
things light: release early, release often. I volunteer to be the
release manager.
With the release ready to go, then we can go out and make some noise,
to help attract more people, etc. We can work w/ the ASF PRC (public
relations committee) on this a bit, I think. Additionally, those of
us who blog should do so. I'd also think it would be great if anyone
with Wikipedia savviness could put us on the map there. Currently,
Wikipedia Mahout is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahout but I think
we could make it a "disambiguation" page, or at least add in an Apache
Mahout page. Just food for thought... Our community is actually
pretty big for a new project, or at least the number of lurkers is
pretty big. I think a number of people are in "wait and see" mode, so
we (i.e. committers and active contributors) need to get over the hump
a bit so that others will feel more comfortable joining in. An
official release should help with that, but do let us know if you have
other ideas as well.
Time wise, I'd love it if we could have the release out within the
month, but of course, I know we are all busy. That being said, we've
got a lot of goodness in our repo now, what w/ Taste, Clustering, the
GA stuff and the Naive Bayes stuff (kudos to our two active GSOC
students Deneche and Robin!)
Cheers,
Grant
- 0.1 Planning Grant Ingersoll
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