[Yes, gmail people, this likely went to your junk folder. ]
On Nov 13, 2010, at 5:28 PM, Lance Norskog wrote:
> It is considered good manners :)
>
> Seriously, if you want to attract a community you have an obligation
> to tell them when you're going to jerk the rug out from under their
> feet.
The rug has been jerked in various ways for every micro version since
as long as I've been with Hadoop. Such jerkings have always (eventually) been
for the positive with a happy ending almost every time. No pain, no gain.
Oh, one other thing.
Here we are, several fairly significant conferences later (both as the
main focus and as one of the leading topics) and I still don't understand why
people have concerns about "attracting a community". When you have what seems
like 100s of companies creating products either built around or integrating
Hadoop (the full gamut of several stealth startups to Major Players like IBM),
it doesn't really seem like that is much of an issue anymore.
At this point, I'm actually in the opposite camp: the community has
grown TOO fast to the point that major problems in the source won't be able to
be fixed because folks will expect less breakage. This is especially easy for
sites with a few hundred nodes (or with enough frosting on top) because
everything seems to be working for them. Many of them will not really
understand that at super large scales, some things just don't work. In order
to fix some of the issues, breakage will occur.
The end result can either be a community divided into multiple camps
due to forking or a community that has learned to tolerate these minor
inconveniences when they pop up. I for one would rather be in the latter, but
it sure seems like some parts of the community (and in many ways, the ASF
itself) would rather it be the former.
Time will tell.
