Hi everyone,
Right now we keep all of the language implementations in SVN together
and release everything in a single source release, which I think is
getting a little awkward for releases. I'd like to discuss the idea of
separating some of the languages out on their own and moving to Apache
git servers instead of SVN.
The motivation for separating languages out is to allow quicker releases
that aren't blocked on problems in other languages. For example, we
recently found license documentation issues through most of the
codebase. That's currently blocking the global 1.8.0 release until we
have time to figure out how to fix the LICENSE and NOTICE included in
each convenience binary artifact. That, in turn, is blocking downstream
projects like parquet-avro that would like to depend on features in 1.8.0.
We're also seeing an influx of new implementations: Microsoft has pinged
the issue to donate their C# implementation, Miki Tebeka is interested
in merging fastavro, and Matthieu Monsch has kindly offered a fast
node-js implementation as well. These are great for expanding the
community and I want to make sure these new projects aren't blocked when
they are used to a faster release cycle.
I propose we allow implementations to use separate repositories, like
avro-python or avro-java, and to make separate releases. This would
allow some languages to have more agile release cycles and would allow
us to version APIs more effectively, using semver for each language and
fixing format compatibility at version 1.
Thoughts and discussion?
rb
--
Ryan Blue
