Hello all, Thank you Andy, for this absolutely wonderful post drawing on your recollection of the perl community. I can see the parallels between the "cesspool of mediocrity" as the "coffee mug throwing". I think I owe more context to my assertion regarding the "cesspool of mediocrity" comment.
I believe we, as the Solr community, have done a much worse than mediocre job of communicating what makes Solr so good. When passionate community members like Andrew come and voice their opinion, it speaks volumes to why Solr is so important as a project. When Alessandro and his colleagues write the invaluable blog posts on Solr to communicate the latest features, we move forward as a community. When Eric (Pugh) and his colleagues evangelize projects like Quepid or Chorus, we move ahead towards a compelling ecosystem story. However, do we believe that this is the best we can do? Or do we think this is enough to attract new users and keep the old ones hooked? We need to attract more contributions from existing users. We need more evangelism from existing users as to why Solr works for them and what are the things that they are able to do with Solr. Big corporations benefiting from Solr should help in the messaging. Small users need to be more vocal (thank you Anuj for reminding us that DIH could still be useful to many). As Jan points out, we are not run by a single company with a marketing budget to light up the airwaves with hype. But, we have in our community something much more valuable: real community members with important and sometimes complex problems solved. However, in many circles, missing ecosystem pieces around Solr and perceived lack of features in Solr's vector search capabilities can cost us many users who are now deciding upon which search engine they should adopt. I am advocating in favour of reaching out and appealing to that new user base. As for all those who pointed out that I should focus on the changes I want to see in Solr, I'd like to thank you for the brilliant idea. Best, Ishan On Fri, 12 Sept 2025 at 19:25, Ishan Chattopadhyaya < ichattopadhy...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'll reply more thoughtfully to all the points over the weekend. > > > My wish is to get Solr 10.0 out the door as quickly as possible > +1, I agree. None of what I expressed a wish for needs to hold up the > release (I don't think I ever said that we should). > > On Thu, 11 Sept 2025 at 06:22, Gus Heck <gus.h...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Speaking of back compat... how many folks have pointed a 9.x solrj at a >> 10.x... I got an error right before I left for CoC that I didn't get to >> fully track down, but it was complaining that base url was null. >> >> http://www.needhamsoftware.com (work) >> https://a.co/d/b2sZLD9 (my fantasy fiction book) >> >> On Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 6:37 PM Chris Hostetter <hossman_luc...@fucit.org> >> wrote: >> >> > >> > : >> 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. >> > : >> > : This brings up memories of the tragedy of Perl 6. >> > >> > +1. >> > >> > Features should be added because they are useful & desirable. >> > Features should be released when they are ready & stable. >> > >> > Our primary concerns for what changes go into each (semanticly) >> versioned >> > release should be based on stability, back compatability, and forward >> > compatibility -- not what kinds of headlines they will generate. >> > >> > >> > -Hoss >> > http://www.lucidworks.com/ >> > >> >
