Alright, our vote has passed, it's time to get on with merging HCatalog into Hive. Here's the things I can think of we need to deal with. Please add additional issues I've missed:
1) Moving the code 2) Dealing with domain names in the code 3) The mailing lists 4) The JIRA 5) The website 6) Committer rights 7) Make a proposal for how HCat is released going forward 8) Publish an FAQ Proposals for how we handle these: Below I propose an approach for how to handle each of these. Feedback welcome. 1) Moving the code I propose that HCat move into a subdirectory of Hive. This fits nicely into Hive's structure since it already has metastore, ql, etc. We'd just add 'hcatalog' as a new directory. This directory would contain hcatalog as it is today. It does not follow Hive's standard build model so we'd need to do some work to make it so that building Hive also builds HCat, but this should be minimal. 2) Dealing with domain names HCat code currently is under org.apache.hcatalog. Do we want to change it? In time we probably should change it to match the rest of Hive (org.apache.hadoop.hive.hcatalog). We need to do this in a backward compatible way. I propose we leave it as is for now and if we decide to in the future we can move the actual code to org.apache.hadoop.hive.hcatalog and create shell classes under org.apache.hcatalog. 3) The mailing lists Given that our goal is to merge the projects and not create a subproject we should merge the mailing lists rather than keep hcat specific lists. We can ask infra to remove hcatalog-*@incubator.apache.org and forward any new mail to the appropriate Hive lists. We need to find out if they can auto-subscribe people from the hcat lists to the hive lists. Given that traffic on the Hive lists is an order of magnitude higher we should warn people before we auto-subscribe them and allow them a chance to get off. 4) JIRA We can create an hcatalog component in Hive's JIRA. All new HCat issues could be filed there. I don't know if there's a way to upload existing JIRAs into Hive's JIRA, but I think it would be better to leave them where they are. We should see if infra can turn off the ability to create new JIRAs in hcatalog. 5) Website We will need to integrate HCatalog's website with Hive's. This should be easy except for the documentation. HCat uses forrest for docs, Hive uses wiki. We will need to put links under 'Documentation' for older versions of HCat docs so users can find them. As far as how docs are handled for the next version of HCatalog, I think that depends on the answer to question 7 (next release of HCat), but I propose that HCat needs to conform to the way Hive does docs on wiki. Though I would strongly encourage the HCat docs to be version specific (that is, have a set of wiki pages for each version). incubator.apache.org/hcatalog should be changed to forward to hive.apache.org. 6) Committer rights Carl will need to set up committer rights for all the new HCat committers. Based on our discussion of making active HCat committers Hive submodule committers this would add the following set: Alan, Sushanth, Francis, Daniel, Vandana, Travis, and Mithun. Ashutosh and Paul are already Hive committers, and neither Devaraj nor Mac have been active in HCat in over a year. 7) Future releases We need to discuss how future releases will happen, as I think this will help developers and users know how to respond to the merge. I propose that HCat will simply become part of future Hive releases. Thus Hive 0.11 (or whatever the next major release is) will include HCatalog. If there are issues found we may need to make HCatalog 0.5.x releases from Hive, which should be fine. But I propose there would not be an HCat 0.6. To be clear I am not proposing that HCat functionality would be subsumed into Hive jars. Just that the existing hcat jars would become part of Hive's release. 8) Communicate all of this We should put up an FAQ page that has this information, as well as tracks our progress while we work on getting these things done. Alan.
