Jing brought up a question in the FLIP-335 discussion thread [1] which I want to move into a dedicated discussion thread as it's a bit more general: How do we handle the deprecation process of Public APIs for Flink 2.0? > > I just have a related question: Do we need to create a FLIP each time > when we want to deprecate any classes?
The community defined the requirements of a FLIP [2] in the following way: - Any major new feature, subsystem, or piece of functionality - Any change that impacts the public interfaces of the project public interfaces in this sense are defined as: - DataStream and DataSet API, including classes related to that, such as StreamExecutionEnvironment - Classes marked with the @Public annotation - On-disk binary formats, such as checkpoints/savepoints - User-facing scripts/command-line tools, i.e. bin/flink, Yarn scripts, Mesos scripts - Configuration settings - Exposed monitoring information I think that this makes sense. There should be a proper discussion on the best approach to change public APIs. Additionally, the FLIP should be a way to document the changes in the discussion process towards the change transparently. In contrast, the impression I have is that we're trying to push all the deprecation work into 1.18 (which has its feature freeze date by the end of next week) to avoid having an additional 1.19 minor release. (Correct me if I'm wrong here but that's the impression I'm getting from the ML threads I've seen so far.) I have some concerns on the Flink 2.0 development in this regard. Zhu Zhu [4] and Chesnay [5] shared similar concerns in the thread about the 2.0 must-have work items. Considering that quite a few (or some; I haven't checked in detail to be honest) of the changes for 2.0 should require a FLIP and that there are still some hanging items [6] (Jira issues which are annotated for Flink 2.0 but have been properly checked, yet): Shouldn't we avoid pushing everything into 1.18? Instead, we should follow the required process properly and might plan for another 1.19 minor release, instead? I'm curious how other contributors feel here and sorry in case I have misinterpreted the ongoing discussions. Best, Matthias [1] https://lists.apache.org/thread/48ysrg1rrtl8s1twg9wmx35l201hnc2w [2] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/Flink/Flink+Improvement+Proposals#FlinkImprovementProposals-Whatisconsidereda%22majorchange%22thatneedsaFLIP ? [3] https://lists.apache.org/thread/r0y9syc6k5nmcxvnd0hj33htdpdj9k6m [4] https://lists.apache.org/thread/45xm348jr8n6s89jldntv5z3t13hdbn8 [5] https://lists.apache.org/thread/98wgqrx0sycpskvgpydvkywsoxt0fkc6 [6] https://lists.apache.org/thread/77hj39ls3kxvx2qd6o09hq1ndtn6hg4y
