On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 6:56 PM, Mattmann, Chris A (388J) <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Kirby, > > On Jul 6, 2011, at 4:30 PM, Kirby Bohling wrote: > >> From what I remember about the list discussions was: > > Quotes and links would help here. >
I'm pretty sure that's the thread, and likely others around that timeline. http://lucene.472066.n3.nabble.com/Nutch-near-future-strategic-directions-td615908.html There's less explicit "let's focus because we have limited developer base" than I remember. I think that got jumbled in my memory with the parts about making it more attractive for external developers, and making it easier to recruit more developers. <snip...> >> The problem Nutch is tackling is large and difficult. The number of >> code contributors is actually fairly small, hence the extreme focus on >> re-using high quality code. > > Where are you getting "the number of code contributors is really small"? > That wasn't meant as a pejorative statement, merely observation. Between the 1.0 release and the recent 1.3 release, here's the count by committer: >From a fresh checkout of git://git.apache.org/nutch.git: $ git log --format=short release-1.0..release-1.3 | grep "Author" | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -r 76 Author: Julien Nioche <[email protected]> 51 Author: Andrzej Bialecki <[email protected]> 46 Author: Chris Mattmann <[email protected]> 21 Author: Markus Jelsma <[email protected]> 8 Author: Sami Siren <[email protected]> 5 Author: Tacettin Guney <[email protected]> 3 Author: Dennis Kubes <[email protected]> 1 Author: Gavin McDonald <[email protected]> I know there are plenty of other folks interested and discussing it. I know there are a number of others who funnel contributions through committers or contribute to ideas and concepts from their commercial projects. But I think that's really just 4-5 very active people (plus Lewis who just recently got committer status). I guess there is more stuff going on in trunk that I really haven't been paying much attention to. > We've added 3 significantly active committers over the past 2 years including > Markus, Julien, Lewis and others. I've been doing a ton of releasing. We get > updates and fixes from folks even more now than ever now that we are releasing > (again I point you to the ApacheCon presentation for some thoughts on this). > > Nutch has had and maintains a tremendous community and a number of active > users. For a while, it was definitely in coast mode, but I think we've made > great > strides over the past 2 years to rectify that. All the recent activity has been great. I wish I'd have more time to contribute (I really would like to see the OSGi stuff happen, and I think I know how to do that, but it'd be much easier if Hadoop used OSGi underneath). Someday, I'm going to go see what it'll take to tackle that, but OSGi tooling really needs to come further along. There was a 3-4 month period where nobody committed (which was the time my job had me actively working on Nutch), and it seemed like 6-8 months that it was Andrzej or nobody between 0.9 and 1.0. Maybe that has just colored my view of the project. It has always seemed that 2-4 people were doing the bulk of the development at any given time. Given what it is trying to do, I find what has been accomplished by the folks who have done it very impressive. Cheers, Kirby > >> >> All that is to say, Nutch still has the same goals and ultimately >> provides all the same functionality, it just isn't going to suffer >> from "Not Invented Here" syndrome. > > Sure, it wouldn't suffer from it b/c most of the others that are inventing > elsewhere were also original contributors to Nutch. > > Cheers, > Chris > > [1] http://s.apache.org/B7u > >> >> Kirby >> >> >> On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 6:04 PM, Mattmann, Chris A (388J) >> <[email protected]> wrote: >>> Also note that quotes can easily be taken out of context. Let's let Julien >>> be specific >>> and explain what he means rather than interpret his quotes. >>> >>> I'm not sure many of the high level goals of Nutch have changed one bit >>> since >>> Doug started the project. The means, and the mechanism for getting there, >>> have >>> a little bit, hopefully to its benefit. >>> >>> You can read about some of this in my ApacheCon NA 2010 presentation: >>> >>> http://s.apache.org/UvU >>> >>> Cheers, >>> Chris >>> >>> On Jul 6, 2011, at 1:21 PM, <[email protected]> >>> <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>>> Julien Nioche, wrote: >>>> >>>> "This is a change in the scope of the project from being an open source >>>> large scale search engine to an open source crawler indeed. We should make >>>> this clearer on the website." >>>> >>>> Just a crawler? That is what worries me. When I kenw nutch 0.3, I loved >>>> its original purpose. I think that most users, like me, do not have the >>>> technical abilities to deal with further issues, quite complicated for >>>> non-programmers.
