Would it be good to make one last release of Nutch before starting the MapReduce effort? This would give people the chance to grab this last, pre-MapReduce version now, instead of having to wait for MapReduce port to be done.
Yes, I would like to make a 0.7 release soon.
While we're in the incubator, releases require a vote of the Incubator PMC, which I would rather avoid, since it involves a lot of folks who are not familiar with Nutch. Once we are a sub-project of Lucene then we can make releases and add comitters with the oversight of only Lucene's PMC. As you know, the Lucene PMC is willing to accept Nutch as a sub-project, so now the only formality is a vote by the Incubator PMC to graduate Nutch from the incubator and into lucene.apache.org/nutch. I will call that vote today and, if all goes well, we should be able to make a 0.7 release in a week or two.
I see there is a new branch for MapReduce. Is the plan to keep going in parallel on the trunk and release MapReduce-less Nutch from there later?
Yes, more or less. I wanted to be able to start incompatible MapReduce-related work without breaking 0.7. Sometime after the 0.7 release we can merge the changes from the mapred branch back into the trunk and kill the mapred branch. Normally I try to avoid branching, but I really want to get started on the MapReduce work without worrying about back-compatibility, but I also still want to make a pre-MapReduce release based on the current trunk. A branch seemed like the best way to do this.
Doug
