Hey Andrzej, I'd be +1 for Nutch being a TLP. I don't think it'll change much (other than to provide more visibility/etc., and to allow more focused decision making by the folks in the Nutch community). The infrastructure moves required to move to TLP status are moving mailing lists, moving JIRA, moving SVN, and moving the website (a bit of redesign/etc.), which shouldn't be that hard, and the infra team can probably help with (at least the first 3 parts if we file issues for them).
I'd volunteer to help with things like list moderation, or whatever else I can do to help. The important things to decide would be: * Who's on the PMC (my suggestion, similar to Tika, make existing Nutch committers PMC members) * Who's the VP (my +1 for you) Cheers, Chris On 3/19/10 12:51 PM, "Andrzej Bialecki" <a...@getopt.org> wrote: Hi devs, The ASF Board indicated recently that so called "umbrella" projects, i.e. projects that host many significant sub-projects, should examine their structure towards simplification, such as merging or splitting out sub-projects. Lucene TLP is such a project. Recently the Lucene PMC accepted the merge of Solr and Lucene core projects. Mahout project will most likely split to its own TLP soon. Which leaves Nutch as a sort of odd duck ;) Moving Nutch to its own TLP has some advantages, mostly an easier decision process - voting on new committers and new releases involves then only those who participate directly in Nutch dev., i.e. the Nutch community. Also, from the coding point of view, Nutch is not intrinsically tied to the Lucene development as if both would require some careful coordination - we just use Lucene as one of many dependencies, and in fact we aim to cleanly separate Nutch search API from Lucene-based API. I can easily imagine Nutch dropping completely the low-level Lucene-based components and moving to a more general search fabric (e.g. SolrCloud). Being its own TLP could also give Nutch more exposure and help to crystallize our mission. There are some disadvantages to such a split, too: we would need to spend some more effort on various administrative tasks, and maintain a separate web site (under Apache, but not under Lucene), and probably some other tasks that I'm not yet aware of. This would also mean that Nutch would have to stand on its own merit, which considering the small number of active committers may be challenging. Let's discuss this, and after we collect some pros and cons I'm going to call for a vote. -- Best regards, Andrzej Bialecki <>< ___. ___ ___ ___ _ _ __________________________________ [__ || __|__/|__||\/| Information Retrieval, Semantic Web ___|||__|| \| || | Embedded Unix, System Integration http://www.sigram.com Contact: info at sigram dot com ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Chris Mattmann, Ph.D. Senior Computer Scientist NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, CA 91109 USA Office: 171-266B, Mailstop: 171-246 Email: chris.mattm...@jpl.nasa.gov WWW: http://sunset.usc.edu/~mattmann/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Adjunct Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
