hi folks, As we expand the scope of the Arrow project, we will acquire more components and code in new languages. Some of these components will be at a different stage of maturity, e.g. lacking integration tests or other important features that we've been working on in the main reference implementations (Java and C++).
As a particular example, we have some increased activity on the JavaScript side. In the case of JavaScript, it would help the development process to get faster feedback from the JS community in their downstream projects (front-end and back-end). The most effective way to do this is to frequently publish code artifacts to NPM. I personally don't have a problem with subcomponents publishing artifacts to package managers outside of the primary Apache project votes and releases, so long as they clearly signal that these package builds are for development and not voted-on artifacts published on behalf of the PMC. Does this seem reasonable? Once JS or another subcomponent reaches a suitable level of maturity, we will need to decide on a release process, whether: * Release based on Arrow upstream, and use the main project version numbers * Release separately (e.g. publish to SVN as JS-X.Y.Z and then upload to NPM, for example) I don't have a problem conducting additional votes so long as the packaging process is automated and the process for validating releases is well documented. So if in the steady state, JS needs to release twice as often as upstream Arrow, that's fine by me. I think it's likely as we move forward that other subprojects (e.g. Python) may need to have their own patch releases in between top-level releases, but for the moment the 4-6 week release cadence of recent times seems to be working okay. Thanks Wes
