Hi, everyone, Just want to briefly share our experience in Apache Kafka. This may or may not apply to the Cassandra community.
We started the KIP ( https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/Kafka+Improvement+Proposals) process in 2015. The following is the summary of the process. 1. It's designed for major new features or changes to public interfaces. 2. Anyone can start a KIP as long as that person has the intention to carry it through. 3. The KIP first goes through a discussion phase and then a voting phase. The vote requires +1 from at least 3 committers to pass. Overall, I think our experience with KIP is positive. It (a) made our compatibility story much better since more people are paying attention to public interface changes; (2) allowed major features to be discussed more thoroughly and often made the original proposal better; (3) non-relevant KIPs (e.g. covered by existing features or other KIPs) were mostly vetted out in the early discussion phase. We made some minor adjustments along the way. For example, if minor changes are later discovered during the implementation of an accepted KIP, those changes can just be added to the voting thread. If there are no objections, those changes are accepted without the need of a new vote. Sometimes, it does feel that KIP adds a bit overhead. For example, changing a simple configuration requires the same multi-day process. However, that's probably minor given the overall benefits. Thanks, Jun
