Hi All, When we originally introduced the FLIP process (which is based on the KIP process from Kafka and refers to the Kafka bylaws for how votes work) voting was set to be “lazy majority”. This means that a FLIP vote "requires 3 binding +1 votes and more binding +1 votes than -1 votes” [1][2]. Currently, we treat FLIP votes more like “lazy Approval”, i.e. if there are no -1 votes FLIP are often accepted, if there is a VOTE thread at all.
I propose that we stick to the original process or update our FLIP document to a voting scheme that we agree on. I’m in favour of sticking with “lazy majority”, for these reasons: 1. FLIPs should typically be used for deeper changes of Flink. These will stick around for quite a while after they’re implemented and the PMC (and the committers) has the burden of maintaining them. I think that therefore FLIP votes are even move important than release votes, because they steer the long time direction of Flink. 2. Requiring at least 3 +1 votes means that there is more work needed for getting a FLIP accepted. I think this is a good thing because it will require people to be more involved in the direction of the project. And if there are not enough +1 votes on a FLIP, this is a signal that there is not enough interest in the feature or that there is not enough bandwidth for working on a feature. 3. This is more an “optics” thing, but I think having clear rules and sticking to them makes it easier for an international community (like the Apache Flink community) to work together and collaborate. If there is preferential treatment for certain parts of the community that makes it hard for other parts to participate and get into the community and understand the workings of it. As a side note, I like the FLIP process because they are a place where we can keep track of important decisions and they are a place that we can point to when there is uncertainty about a certain feature in the future. For example FLIP-28 [3] (which is now discarded) would be a place where we record the decision that we want Flink to be Scala free in the long term. We could then point to this in the future. There are some decisions in Flink that are somewhat hidden in ML discussions or Jira issues, and therefore hard to find, for example the decision to eventually phase out the DataSet API, or the decision to drop the older Python APIs, or the semantics of savepoints and checkpoints. Some FLIPs might not be about implementing a certain feature but just a general direction that we want to take. I think we should have more of these. What do you think? Best, Aljoscha [1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLINK/Flink+Improvement+Proposals [2] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/Bylaws#Bylaws-Approvals [3] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLINK/FLIP-28%3A+Long-term+goal+of+making+flink-table+Scala-free
