Thank you all for the very positive response to our proposal to contribute the training materials that have been at training.ververica.com to the Apache Flink project. Now I’d like to begin the more detailed discussion of how to go about this.
In that earlier thread I mentioned that we were thinking of merging the markdown-based web pages into flink.apache.org, and to add the exercises to flink-playgrounds. This was based on thinking that it would be something of a maintenance headache to add the website content into the docs, where it would have to be versioned. Since then, a better approach has been suggested: We already have quite a bit of “getting started” material in the docs: Code Walkthroughs, Docker Playgrounds, Tutorials, and Examples. Having a second location (namely flink.apache.org) where this kind of content could be found doesn’t seem ideal. So let’s go ahead and add the expository content from the training materials to the documentation, with pointers into the rest of the docs (which are already present in the training), and with pointers to the exercises (rather than including the exercise descriptions in the docs). This will keep the content that will need more frequent revision out of the documentation. Then let’s create a new repo -- named flink-training -- that contains the exercises, the solutions, and the tests that go with them, PLUS all of the material that describes how to get setup to do the exercises, the explanations for each exercise, and accompanying discussion material that should be read after doing each exercise. Note that the exercise solutions already have tests, and Travis is already being used for CI on the existing project, so CI shouldn’t be an issue. Action Item: would a committer or PMC member kindly volunteer to help with creating this new flink-training repo? With the content refactored in this way, I believe ongoing maintenance won’t be much trouble. With each new Flink release I’ve been updating the exercises to build against the latest release, and to avoid any newly deprecated parts of the API. But since these exercises are focused on the most basic parts of the API, that hasn’t been difficult. As for content from the training website that would move into the docs, this content is much more stable, and has only needed a gentle revision every year or two. Regards, David
