On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 4:50 PM, Doug Cutting <cutt...@apache.org> wrote:
> On 08/12/2010 01:38 PM, David Reiss wrote: > >> Todd specifically told us that he did not care about getting commit >> access. >> > > The first proposal of Todd as committer I find was by Esteve Fernandez on > 24 December 2008, to which you responded: > > "I don't think that is necessary. As long as a committer can check in > patches that are approved, I don't know of any reason that the primary > reviewer needs to be a committer." > > Todd then said: > > "While I'm flattered to be nominated, I'll agree with David here -- > especially given the git-friendly workflow here, I've never had any issues > getting patches in on the Erlang bindings or elsewhere." > > "Necessary" is not the same as "deserved" nor "cared about". > > > Todd seems to have lost interest in further work here. >>> >> This is because Todd changed jobs, and his new employer does not use >> Thrift. >> > > Todd has not recently changed employment. He continues to work at > Cloudera. > > Hey look, a thread about me! The majority of my contributions were at my previous job, but I did get committership and do the 0.2 release after joining Cloudera as Doug said. Cloudera does use Thrift internally, so having a stable release out was important for us. I haven't been as involved in further releases because frankly, Thrift does what it's supposed to do and does a good job of it. What the ASF seems to see as a stagnating project seems to me to just be a mature one - Thrift has a single purpose, achieves it effectively, and does a good job for lots and lots of people including both my former and current employers. The major issues I've run into (and seen coworkers run into) have had to do with the release packaging and build, which we've improved a bit, and will improve on the distribution side of things as people like Debian start packaging the bits. I don't have the data offhand, but I remember looking at some point last year at the release velocity for similarly mature projects and found that Thrift's is not out of the ordinary. For example, APR seems to have released pretty infrequently in recent years, and most of the releases have had just a couple of commits worth of changes. The actual commit velocity to Thrift was much higher, last I looked. Although Thrift is young in the incubator, it's important to realize that it was already a mature project when it entered -- in fact it was a mature second-generation project, having grown out of a previous system internal to Facebook. So lots of experimentation is something that the community doesn't want to see happening in trunk - it's hard to experiment on an infrastructure project in ways that won't break APIs or wire protocols, and those are the two things that are most important about the project. On a side note, I am big -1 on commit-then-review. I've been told it's the "apache way", but none of the Apache projects I've worked on (Hadoop, Thrift, Cassandra) have been operated like that, nor have any of the internal infrastructure projects I've worked on at any company larger than 10 engineers. It may make sense in certain projects, but in general it seems unsafe, and I wouldn't really trust most code bases developed in this fashion. Thanks -Todd -- Todd Lipcon Software Engineer, Cloudera
