Hey folks, I wanted to give a little bit of additional context beyond what JB and Jack have said so far in other threads. Everyone’s observations about the level of community code contributions, the committer/PPMC list setup, adjacency to other projects, etc. are spot on. The code has been pretty much entirely delivered by Snowflake at this point. And the PPMC/committer division in the proposal is atypical, but as Jack and JB called out, it’s reflective of the collaborative community building that’s been happening over the last two months; more on this below.
>From a code contribution perspective, we’ve largely been blocked on getting a >shareable repo up and running, which I admit took longer than we’d hoped. That >was primarily due to Snowflake internal logistics, which as with any large >company, is what it is at times. Now that we have that in place, I expect to >see more material code contributions rolling in over the coming weeks. We’ve >been having early discussions with the Dremio folks about how Nessie features >like catalog level versioning can be integrated into Polaris, and once we >align on a concrete design, Robert and JB and crew will be diving in more >deeply. Similarly, we’ve had early discussions on integrations with other >partners in the community, and now that the codebase is fully public, it will >be easier for us to make concrete progress on turning those discussions into >actual code contributions (e.g., there's already some early Trino integration >work happening [1].) >From a community building perspective, in particular the concern that it can >be tough to build a community for a podling in a vacuum, I completely agree. >If you start a podling with no community in sight, you may be left floundering >and alone for quite some time. That’s why JB and I have spent the last two >months bootstrapping that process, finding stakeholders who are interested in >helping grown Polaris in some way, making sure we’re directionally aligned on >where we want the project to go, and identifying specific individuals with >both a vested interest in contribution and experience helping grow and run >Apache projects in the Apache way. A lot of time, thought, and collaboration >went into building this initial community across a diverse set of >stakeholders, and we wanted to reflect that in calling out the proposed PPMC >list separately. As JB said, we’re happy to adjust the lists to something more >standard if desired, but we believe the story behind the lists is important in >this case. >From project overlap perspective, I just want to echo Jack’s take on things: >Polaris for now is fully focused on Iceberg, taking a depth first approach, >with the goal of implementing the entire Iceberg REST API spec and helping >push forward the state of the art in the Iceberg ecosystem for features like >governance that are highly important for all of our collective user bases. >It’s absolutely adjacent to Gravitino, but as others have said, it feels to me >that they are heading in somewhat different directions overall. I also think >there’s lots of empty space in the open source catalog ecosystem in general at >this point, with plenty of room for both of these efforts to beneficially >exist in parallel. And we are absolutely open to discussing collaborations, >with Gravitino, Amoro, or anyone else; JB has highlighted the importance of >this from the very beginning of our Polaris conversations, and I completely >agree. And lastly yes, any existing trademark issues should be fixed. I know there was one batch discovered after the initial push that we were working on fixing, but I'll go back and see if there are others we haven't addressed (or if those fixes somehow just haven't made it out yet.) Thank you everyone for the feedback and enthusiasm. We appreciate it. :-) [1] https://github.com/polaris-catalog/polaris/pull/42 Cheers, -Tyler On 2024/07/31 07:30:07 Justin Mclean wrote: > Hi, > > I sent a reply earlier, but my email is acting up and looks like it didn’t > get through. I have some concerns with this proposal. > > In general, the incubator likes projects to have a code base and a small > community, I’m not seeing a community here. Trying to build one during > incubation can be difficult. We have recently rejected proposals in a similar > state, asking them to come back when they have more of a community around the > project. > > The PPMC/committer split is unusual. > > There seems to be little relation to people who have contributed to the > project and the initial committer list. A large number of the people involved > in commits (80+%) are from one vendor, with two exceptions, and two others > have made one or two minor commits of a couple of lines. > > Adding people to PPMC to help out also seems unusual, as that is the mentor's > job. > > In short, this seems to me (and I could be wrong) like a project mostly from > a single vendor, but the proposal has been made to make it look like more > people are involved. It may well be that these people will be involved, but > I’d prefer if the project was upfront about this and added committers the > usual way during incubation. > > In short, the initial commit list looks problematic to me. > > Kind Regards, > Justin > > P.S. The repo landing page/readme has some ASF trademark issues that would be > good to address. > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
