Hello all, I would like to get a conversation started on how we plan to move forward with FlinkML.
Development on the library currently has been mostly dormant for the past 6 months, mainly I believe because of the lack of available committers to review PRs. Last month we got together with Till and Marton and talked about how we could try to solve this and ensure continued development of the library. We see 3 possible paths we could take: 1. Externalize the library, creating a new repository under the Apache Flink project. This decouples the development of FlinkML from the Flink release cycle, allowing us to move faster and incorporate new features as they become available. As FlinkML is a library under development tying it to specific versions does not make much sense anyway. The library would depend on the latest snapshot version of Flink. It would then be possible for the Flink distribution to cherry-pick parts of the library to be included with the core distribution. 2. Keep the development under the main Flink project but bring in new committers. This would mean that the development remains as is and is tied to core Flink releases, but new worked should get merged at much more regular intervals through the help of committers other than Till. Marton Balassi has volunteered for that role and I hope that more might take up that role. 3. A third option is to fork FlinkML on a repository on which we are able to commit freely (again through PRs and reviews of course) and merge good parts back into the main repo once in a while. This allows for faster progress and more experimental work but obviously creates fragmentation. I would like to hear your thoughts on these three options, as well as discuss other alternatives that could help move FlinkML forward. Cheers, Theodore
