As you all know the continued success and growth of an open source project is dependent on new members joining the project and contributing. This will depend on how accessible the project is for new folks to make meaningful contributions. For a project like ours where the code base has been in development for years, it can be quite daunting for new members to just pick up and make contributions. We need to find ways to make it easier for people to do so. Malhar, namely the operator library, is an area where people can contribute without requiring deep knowledge or expertise.
We have seen operators take time to mature as evidenced by the road taken by some of our commonly used operators to reach production quality. This is due to the fact that apart from the core functionality the operator is trying to implement there are many other aspects to address such as performance, idempotency, processing semantics and scalability. It would be difficult even for folks familiar with all these aspects to get everything right the first time around and produce comprehensive operators let alone first time contributors. At the same time operators cannot reach this maturity level unless they get used in different scenarios and get a good look at by different people. In maturity I am also including API stability. I would like to propose creation of a space inside Malhar, a sub-folder, where contributions can first go in if they are not fully ready and when they mature can be moved out of the sub-folder into an existing module or a new module of its own, the package paths can remain the same. The evaluation bar for contributions into this space would be more permissive than it is today, it would require the functionality the operator was developed for be working but will not necessitate that all fault tolerant and scalability aspects be addressed. It will also allow new operators that are variations of existing operators till such time as we can determine if the new functionality can be subsumed by the original operator or it makes sense for the new operator to exist as a separate entity. It will be up-to committers and contributors to work together and make the decisions as to whether the individual contributions go into this space or are ready to just go into the regular modules. What does everyone think. Thanks, Pramod
