Good morning Knowles, Thank you for sharing this feedback. I think your frustration is well founded. I think most/all of the active committers carry around a sense of guilt about KIPs that we haven’t been able to review.
We do have a responsibility to hold auditable, public design discussions before adopting any new features. As a volunteer organization, we are also at the mercy of committers’ capacity outside of work and personal life. The main thing we do to try and stay responsive is to continue to add new folks to the committer roster in the hopes that with more committers, we have a better chance that someone will be able to volunteer to review each new KIP. Unfortunately, aside from that, we have only this loose system where committers try to do the best we can, and new contributors try to keep pinging their discussion threads until someone responds. Your email itself serves as a good wake-up call, and I’m sure that people will take a look at that list of hanging KIPs now. Hopefully, it will also provide a spark that leads someone to propose a process improvement. I’ll certainly be thinking about it myself. Thanks again, John On Tue, Oct 19, 2021, at 09:07, Knowles Atchison Jr wrote: > Good morning, > > The current process of KIPs needs to be improved. There are at least a > handful of open KIPs with existing PRs that are in a purgatory state. I > understand that people are busy, but if you are going to gatekeep Kafka > with this process, then it must be responsive. Even if the community > decides they do not want the change, the KIP should be addressed and closed > out. > > The entire wiki page is a graveyard of unresponded KIPs. For some changes, > it takes a nontrivial amount of effort to put together the wiki page and > one has to essentially write the code implementation hoping that it will be > pulled into the codebase. This is very frustrating as an external developer > to have put in the work and then effectively be ignored. > > We have to maintain a custom build because KIPs are not debated, voted on, > or merged in a timely manner. > > Knowles
