Hi all, I do very much agree with the statement from Aljosha's initial message, which is currently also expressed in the description page of a FLIP.
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.
Therefore I think we should enforce following the lazy majority
approach. I will probably just repeat what was already said, but I do
think this would make the decisions more visible, easier to reference in
case of related decisions, and also this would show if the community has
capacity to implement the FLIP. Nowadays, even if a FLIP is "accepted"
it might be just stale because there are no committers that have the
capacity to help with the changes.
Another, maybe an orthogonal issue, is that we could maybe use this
process for agreeing on a scope of a release. I think it might make
sense to construct a release plan of an accepted FLIPs. This would
enforce better scoping of FLIPs, as they would have to fit into a single
release. In my opinion FLIPs that spawn multiple releases(thus even over
multiple years) are rarely relevant in the future anymore, as the
project evolves and it usually makes sense to revisit the original
proposal anyway. This would have the benefits that:
* we have a clear scope for a release rather than just a vague list of
features that we want to have.
* the whole community is on the same page what a certain feature means
* the scope does not change drastically during the development period
As for what should and what should not deserve a FLIP, I actually quite
like the definition in the FLIPs page[1]. I think it does make sense to
have a FLIP, and as a result a voting process, for any *public* or major
change. I agree with Gordon. Even if the change is trivial it might
affect external systems/users and it is also a commitment from the
community. Therefore I think they deserve a vote.
Lastly, I think Jark raised a valid point. We should have a clear
understanding what binding votes in this case mean. I think it makes
sense to consider PMC's and committers' votes as binding for FLIPs
voting. Otherwise we would lose the aspect of committing to help with
getting the FLIP into the codebase.
To sum up I would opt for enforcing the lazy majority. I would suggest
to consider constructing a release plan with a list of accepted FLIPs.
Best,
Dawid
[1]
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLINK/Flink+Improvement+Proposals#FlinkImprovementProposals-Whatisconsidereda%22majorchange%22thatneedsaFLIP?
On 27/06/2019 04:15, Jark Wu wrote:
> +1 for sticking to the lazy majority voting.
>
> A question from my side, the 3+1 votes are binding votes which only active
> (i.e. non-emeritus) committers and PMC members have?
>
>
> Best,
> Jark
>
>
> On Wed, 26 Jun 2019 at 19:07, Tzu-Li (Gordon) Tai <tzuli...@apache.org>
> wrote:
>
>> +1 to enforcing lazy majority voting for future FLIPs, starting from FLIPs
>> that are still currently under discussion (by the time we've agreed on the
>> FLIP voting process).
>>
>> My two cents concerning "what should and shouldn't be a FLIP":
>>
>> I can understand Chesnay's argument about how some FLIPs, while meeting the
>> criteria defined by the FLIP guidelines, feel to not be sufficiently large
>> to justify a FLIP.
>> As a matter of fact, the FLIP guidelines explicitly mention that "Exposed
>> Monitoring Information" is considered public interface; I guess that was
>> why this FLIP came around in the first place.
>> I was also hesitant in whether or not the recent FLIP about keyed state
>> snapshot binary format unification (FLIP-41) deserves to be a FLIP, since
>> the complexity of the change is rather small.
>>
>> However, with the fact that these changes indeed touch the general public
>> interface of Flink, the scope (including all potential 3rd party projects)
>> is strictly speaking hard to define.
>> Outcomes of such changes, even if the complexity of the change is rather
>> trivial, can still stick around for quite a while.
>> In this case, IMO the value of proposing a FLIP for such a change is less
>> about discussing design or implementation details, and more on the fact
>> that said change requires an official vote for approval from the community.
>>
>> Best,
>> Gordon
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 5:50 PM Chesnay Schepler <ches...@apache.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> The FLIP guidelines disagree with your first point.
>>>
>>> The guidelines are a bit contradictory as at some places we say that
>>> FLIPs are for major features, and in other places say they are for any
>>> changes to the public API.
>>> This very point came up in the recent FLIP about standardizing metrics.
>>> Metrics are somewhat part of the public API, and thus you can interpret
>>> the guidelines to say that you need a FLIP. But in terms of scope, I
>>> believed it to not be sufficiently large to justify a FLIP.
>>>
>>> Overall I'm very much in favor of sticking to the lazy majority voting
>>> scheme and enforcing it,
>>> but I do think we have to reevaluate what changes require a FLIP and
>>> which don't.
>>>
>>> On 26/06/2019 11:37, Aljoscha Krettek wrote:
>>>> 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
>>>
>>>
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