----- Original Message ----
> From: Todd Lipcon <t...@cloudera.com>
> To: thrift-dev@incubator.apache.org
> Sent: Fri, August 13, 2010 12:57:52 AM
> Subject: Re: time for a reboot?
>
> On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 7:20 PM, Joe Schaefer <joe_schae...@yahoo.com>wrote:
>
> > I both respect and agree with your remarks. With respect to the delay
> > between considering someone for committership and actually becoming one,
> > it's true that it is a process that spans several days if not weeks.
> > However
> > we really aren't looking for drive-thru committers, we want people who
> > will show sustained dedication to the project, spanning several months
> > if not years (iow Todd's committership here so far hasn't been something
> > I'd consider a success). Remember it's community over code at Apache.
> >
> >
> In my defense, when I was nominated for being a committer, I did say that my
> plan was to help with the 0.2 release and then likely step back. As I think
> is the case for every person who works on Thrift, Thrift is not a primary
> responsibility. It seems your stance above indicates that the only
> "successful" committers are those who spend substantial time on the project
> every week - this seems counter to your earlier point that the bar for
> committership is too high.
>
> As a central piece of infrastructure, Thrift *should* be a slow moving
> project. It would make me very nervous if it released more than a couple
> times a year! As a random datapoint, I've heard from within Google that the
> move from Protocol Buffers v1 to v2 was an incredibly disruptive change that
> took more than a year to do throughout the organization. At a much smaller
> scale, I've seen the upgrade from Thrift 0.1 to 0.2 burn about a man-week of
> development time internally due to changes in the generated Java code -- so
> you can see that releases with breaking changes have a large cost and hence
> the team is reasonably cautious about any changes that might cause them.
>
> The Apache mantra is "community over code", and in this case, the community
> is voting that they want the code to not evolve rapidly. It's a stable piece
> of infrastructure and should be treated as such. Perhaps those who have been
> working on some more experimental changes would like to weigh in here if
> they feel like their contributions have been unfairly treated?
AFAICT the changelogs for the last 2 releases do not bear out your
suggestion that Thrift is an incredibly stable project. Neither
does the fact that over 800 issues have been filed against this
codebase since it's been brought here. Just today someone complained
about a bug report taking over 1 year to be addressed. The fact is
that there is plenty of work to go around and only 2-3 people actually
doing it. That is the reason it is a slow-moving project IMO. Unlike
cassandra people are STILL running thrift in production with local mods
instead of using straight releases. Reading the email stream today alone
tells a rather different story than you appear to believe is true.
