I would guess that most, if not all, members of this list have done an evaluation where they put Solr up against ES/OS, and chose Solr for one reason or another.
This is not a zero-sum game. If you feel so strongly that Solr is currently a "cesspool of mediocrity," then maybe you need to find something that better fits your own needs and standards of quality. There are some (many?) of us who value the stability, and consistent incremental improvements without requiring massive amounts of rewrites at every release because somebody thinks they need to follow the latest fad. Your list seems to be written from the perspective of someone who does not actually need to take responsibility for the features that you seem to think we need. When I see lists like this I, and probably most professional programmers, see a mountain of bugs and support questions all coming at once, on top of the work to plan, write, and test the code. Incremental improvements are a way to make these manageable. That, and most of your stuff means Solr needs to replicate functionality that is already available. If I need a Kibana / Dashboards setup, I will use that -- I'm not going to be religious about not using it just because the underlying search engine. These are tools, not religions. There are also opportunities in your list of requests for you to contribute back. The easiest way to get some of your requests into Solr is to take it responsibility for it, plan, write, test, and go through the review process, and commit to helping maintain it. Perhaps if you were to choose one of your items and do that, you would get a feeling for how much work you're actually talking about here, rather than (what seems like) firing off a set of your demands for people to contribute their own time and money so that you can live in your "happy bubble". -Andrew > On 5 Sep 2025, at 02:47, Ishan Chattopadhyaya <ichattopadhy...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> Your list has cool stuff but I think mostly can ship at whatever minor > version. Solr has seen incremental progress over the years at minor > releases. > > If we don't ship headline grabbing features in a major release, we might as > well abandon this project and dedicate our focus on building OpenSearch or > Elasticsearch. > We have had so many important features in Apache Solr introduced in some > incremental release in 9.x. But, what is the perception among users about > Solr's capabilities? I will not say here what I believe people think of > Apache Solr in 2025, lest you or others shoot down the messenger of bad > news, just to stay in a happy bubble. > >> FWIW I think Solr 11 is very likely to occur within a year following Solr >> 10. Maybe that's the release of your dreams, but progress will be >> incremental (delivering value sooner). > > It would be very unfortunate to let Apache Solr languish in a cesspool of > mediocrity for an entire release cycle. > > > On Fri, 5 Sept 2025 at 02:38, David Smiley <dsmi...@apache.org> wrote: > >> I suppose we all have our wish list of what we want the next major version >> to have. I have mine (mostly geeky internal details BTW).... and as the >> need to release draws near, I get more realistic as to what limited time >> resources I'm going to spend on what topic. What can wait vs what "needs" >> to happen at a major version boundary. For many existing Solr users, their >> *pressing* needs will be met with up to date versions Java & Jetty & Lucene >> -- all things present in Solr 10 right now. Your list has cool stuff but I >> think mostly can ship at whatever minor version. Some highly wanted things >> will come to 9.x. Solr has seen incremental progress over the years at >> minor releases. The major releases are not that significant except for an >> opportunity to break compatibility in some way. That is really important >> for us stewarding a project that's been around for almost 20 years -- we >> have to get rid of things or change things. >> >> FWIW I think Solr 11 is very likely to occur within a year following Solr >> 10. Maybe that's the release of your dreams, but progress will be >> incremental (delivering value sooner). >> >> On Thu, Sep 4, 2025 at 2:42 PM Ishan Chattopadhyaya < >> ichattopadhy...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> Hi All, >>> >>> Here's my wishlist for Solr 10, to make Solr claw back the lost/losing >>> mindshare amongst developers and AI practitioners. >>> >>> Here's what I think Solr 10 release should have (in addition to whatever >> we >>> already have): >>> >>> ** Vector Search / AI* >>> - GPU based HNSW indexing >>> - Local embeddings generation >>> - Multi-vector fields >>> - Visualization, metrics, recipes >>> - Easy integration with storage and inference platforms like Sagemaker, >>> Nemo, AWS S3 Vectors and everything else >>> - Stretch goal: Global vectors indexing support (like IVF family of >>> algorithms) >>> - First party MCP support >>> >>> ** General* >>> - Official client libraries in Python, Rust, Go, etc. >>> - Something akin to Kibana / OpenSearch dashboards >>> - A new modern UI with feature completeness >>> - Entries in every meaningful AI leaderboard out there, preferably at par >>> with other Lucene based search engines >>> - Tons of more examples and live demos >>> >>> >>> ** User experience *- Fix naming everywhere (if you know Solr, you know >>> what I mean) >>> - No confusion around various modes of Solr >>> - Clear documentation of the API >>> >>> We may be able to achieve these, or we might not be able to. If we work >>> towards these goals (or some of these), these should be achievable. We >> will >>> be in an excellent position with regard to earning back respect among the >>> community and placing it at par or above search and AI engines. Solr 10 >> is >>> a great time to hit these goals. >>> >>> If someone has ideas (no matter how crazy, hard, or exploratory) on what >>> else could be good to have, please help us with suggestions. >>> >>> Thanks and regards, >>> Ishan >>> >>> >>> [image: SearchScale] >>> *Ishan Chattopadhyaya* >>> *Search Consultant, SearchScale* >>> >>> is...@searchscale.com >>> >>
