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 <><
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