2007/1/22, Otis Gospodnetic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Hi, I've been meaning to write this message for a while, and Andrzej's StrategicGoals made me compose it, finally. Nutch 0.8 and beyond is very cool, very powerful, and once Hadoop stabilizes, it will be even more valuable than it is today. However, I think there is still a need for something much simpler, something like what Nutch 0.7 used to be. Fairly regular nutch-user inquiries confirm this. Nutch has too few developers to maintain and further develop both of these concepts, and the main Nutch developers need the more powerful version - 0.8 and beyond. So, what is going to happen to 0.7? Maintenance mode? I feel that there is enough need for 0.7-style Nutch that it might be worth at least considering and discussing the possibility of somehow branching that version into a parallel project that's not just in a maintenance mode, but has its own group of developers (not me, no time :( ) that pushes it forward. Thoughts?
Before doubling (or after 0.9.0 tripling?) the maintenance/development work please consider the following: One option would be re factoring the code in a way that the parts that are usable to other projects like protocols?, parsers (this actually was proposed by Jukka Zitting some time last year) and stuff would be modified to be independent of nutch (and hadoop) code. Yeah, this is easy to say, but would require significant amount of work. The "more focused",smaller chunks of nutch would probably also get bigger audience (perhaps also outside nutch land) and that way perhaps more people willing to work for them. Don't know about others but at least I would be more willing to work towards this goal than the one where there would be practically many separate projects, each sharing common functionality but different code base. -- Sami Siren
