On Tue, Jan 01, 2019 at 02:20:21PM -0500, Tharindu Mathew wrote: > Hi, > > Happy new year to the mlpack community! > > Overall, I'm trying to understand whether mlpack is actively developed (I > understand it was an academic project taken up 10 years ago, and much has > changed with everything (at least in the news) mostly being about deep > learning now), or whether there's an active interest in adding more > features and getting more releases out. I was wondering how one could > contribute, ie whether there's a priority based feature/bug tracker.
Hey Tharindu, Happy new year! mlpack is definitely still actively developed---there is active PR reviewing, merging, and responding to issues basically every day from lots of different people. The project has come a long way from its origins at Georgia Tech as an academic project, like you pointed out. There is not currently a formal release schedule but I would like to have one (time has not permitted that though). One of the big problems right now is the difficulty of a release; it is a tedious process that takes me something like 4+ hours of work, so, I have been working towards an automated release process. But time is short, so that isn't done yet. A lot of recent work has gone into splitting out the optimization framework into a different project called ensmallen: https://github.com/mlpack/ensmallen I can say that definitely there is active interest in adding more features. Here are some future directions that I intend to go, and that I have heard others intend to go: * Automatically generated Markdown for each of the bindings. I have most of this working now, but I need to get the Markdown->HTML parts working right. See https://github.com/mlpack/mlpack/issues/1511. * GPU support via Bandicoot: https://gitlab.com/conradsnicta/bandicoot Personally this is high on my priority list and I am hoping in the next handful of weeks to start devoting more time to that. * A binding to the command-line or Python (or other languages) for neural networks: https://github.com/mlpack/mlpack/issues/1254 * Callbacks for ensmallen optimizers: https://github.com/mlpack/mlpack/issues/1481 * Bindings to Go (there is a PR open), Julia (I am nearly done with this), and R (I started but did not get far). * There are lots of mostly-finished PRs open that just need a little more to get them across the finish line. * Summer of Code 2019: we'll apply, although the organization application period isn't open quite yet. A lot of work goes into GSoC every year. That's not a comprehensive list for sure. Others may have other things that they are working on too. :) I'm hoping to release mlpack 3.1.0 with better documentation, but I think maybe in the next week or two I'll release mlpack 3.0.5 with some backported bugfixes. There's not really a formal process of any sort for this, and if anyone else wanted to take over the process of releasing the library and managing that I of course would have no issue with it. There's not really a prioritized bugtracker, although some Github issues do have labels for priority. Honestly I spend a significant portion of my time just trying to stay above water with the different requests I receive and the PRs that need to be reviewed. :) I hope this helps! I would say right now the mlpack community is the most active it has ever been. Thanks, Ryan -- Ryan Curtin | "And do not attempt to grow a brain!" [email protected] | - Sgt. Howard Payne _______________________________________________ mlpack mailing list [email protected] http://knife.lugatgt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mlpack
