IMHO, I don't think having separate versions and releases for the scala API
will work for the following reasons:

   - Scala API is not its own Apache project, so we don't really have a
   mechanism to release it separately and not the manpower of volunteers to
   maintain all the BS that goes along with releases
   - We operate under the assumption (which is fair, I think) that the
   Scala API is only compatible with the exact C API for which it was built
   against.  Since the Scala API ships with its own libmxnet.so, and
   libmxnet.so is "stable" only at release boundaries, then it would be risky
   to pick arbitrary points in the Scala evolution as "new versions" and birth
   them into the World with just whatever mxnet commit was at the top at that
   time

I am also in favor of changing the namespace ASAP before the massive
adoption of the Scala API that's about to happen, because it'll be way
harder to do later.

-Chris


On Fri, Mar 9, 2018 at 2:09 PM, Naveen Swamy <mnnav...@gmail.com> wrote:

> MXNet Scala APis already generate a MXNet Core Scala package based off the
> cpp backend already. I think customers who are building from source would
> love to get Maven package given that it takes so much pain.
>
> Are you suggesting we take MXNet-Scala APIs into a separate release cycle,
> it is possible and can start with this one but It would not make a lot of
> sense to start MXNet-Scala 1.0 depending on MXNet 1.0(cpp). This won't very
> different from breaking backward compatibility when we release a new
> package.
>
> IMO managing separate release cycles for different language bindings could
> turn into a lot of work for the community unnecessarily especially since
> they are closely
>
> On Fri, Mar 9, 2018 at 1:56 PM, Marco de Abreu <
> marco.g.ab...@googlemail.com
> > wrote:
>
> > While it has never been published, there have still been releases under
> > Apache and - as you mentioned - customers that build off the source. This
> > would cause compatibility issues.
> >
> > In general I actively support the idea of enhancing the Scala package,
> but
> > I think that we have to solve another problem first. At the moment, all
> > APIs are bound to the MXNet core versioning and vica versa.
> >
> > In my opinion, we should first separate the APIs from the MXNet core,
> start
> > versioning them separately and then make changes like these. While it
> would
> > be possible (although not right) to make an exception here, we still
> don't
> > solve the root problem and we are going to run into the same issues with
> > the next big API update.
> >
> > Just to mention another example: our team got a request to rewrite the
> Cpp
> > package, but we actually would not be able to merge it into MXNet since
> it
> > breaks the existing Cpp package API - means we would need a major version
> > increase.
> >
> > We really should solve this problem once and for all, giving back a lot
> of
> > freedom and reducing overhead in the long term.
> >
> > -Marco
> >
> > YiZhi Liu <eazhi....@gmail.com> schrieb am Fr., 9. März 2018, 22:44:
> >
> > > +1 for changing the namespace asap. for the maven deploy, we can have
> > > it build along with pip deployment.
> > >
> > >
> > > 2018-03-09 10:15 GMT-08:00 Naveen Swamy <mnnav...@gmail.com>:
> > > > Hi Guys,
> > > >
> > > > I am working on MXNet Scala Inference APIs
> > > > <https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MXNET-50> along with another
> > > > contributor Roshani. A while back I noticed that we haven't been
> > > publishing
> > > > the scala package to Maven for a while now(last one being v0.11.1a
> > under
> > > > the dmlc namespace).
> > > > Currently users have to build the package manually and then use it,
> > this
> > > > hinders adoption and also is painful to build everything from source.
> > > >
> > > > I also see that we haven't changed the namespace to org.apache and
> > > instead
> > > > are still ml.dmlc namespace.
> > > >
> > > > I wanted to seek your opinion about changing the MXNet-Scala package
> > > > namespace to org.apache for the Scala package and publish to Maven in
> > the
> > > > upcoming release. I understand that this probably breaks the Semver
> > > > semantics that is agreed upon, However I would like to point out that
> > the
> > > > Scala package has never been published to maven as 1.0 under
> > org.apache.
> > > >
> > > > Open to suggestions.
> > > >
> > > > Thanks, Naveen
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > --
> > > Yizhi Liu
> > > DMLC member
> > > Amazon Web Services
> > > Vancouver, Canada
> > >
> >
>

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