Hi everyone, I would like to open a discussion on the process regarding new connectors. As you know from previous updates [1] we are making a lot of progress on externalizing connectors that are currently hosted inside in the Flink repository.
One topic I would like to bring up for discussion is how the Flink community wants to deal with new connectors. I've been contacted by many contributors who are interested in working on one or more connectors. Most of these connectors are not yet made public or development hasn't started yet. When reading up on the Flink Bylaws [2] I would argue that connectors that are currently already existing (but not under a Flink project scope) would fall under 'Adoption of New Codebase' which would require a 2/3 majority vote by PMC members. Looking at the FLIP requirements [3] you could argue that any new connector is 'a major new feature, subsystem, or piece of functionality'. A pro of needing to create a (small) FLIP for a new connector is that someone needs to think about the design, implementation and requires a vote, so there is more control. The downside of it is that a FLIP is considered a drawback, given that a connector normally should be using only the public interfaces provided by Flink so you could argue it's just an implementation. I'm looking forward to your input to see if we can reach consensus on this topic, so it can be included in the documentation for contributors that want to work and maintain a new connector. Best regards, Martijn Visser https://twitter.com/MartijnVisser82 https://github.com/MartijnVisser [1] https://lists.apache.org/thread/8k1xonqt7hn0xldbky1cxfx3fzh6sj7h [2] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLINK/Flink+Bylaws [3] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLINK/Flink+Improvement+Proposals#FlinkImprovementProposals-Whatisconsidereda%22majorchange%22thatneedsaFLIP ?
