Definitely on the same page..+1 to keep it in a separate repo (at least until the cose becomes "stable" and widely adopted from the community)
Il Mar 15 Ott 2019, 23:17 Stephan Ewen <se...@apache.org> ha scritto: > Hi Flink folks! > > After the positive reaction to the contribution proposal for Stateful > Functions, I would like to kick off the discussion for the big question: In > which form should it go into Flink? > > Before jumping into the "repository" question directly, let's get some > clarity on what would be our high-level goal with this project and the > contribution. > My thinking so far was: > > - Stateful Functions is a way for Flink and stream processing to become > applicable for more general application development. That is a chance to > grow our community to a new crowd of developers. > > - While adding this to Flink gives synergies with the runtime it build on > top of, it makes sense to offer the new developers a lightweight way to get > involved. Simple setup, easy contributions. > > - This is a new project, the API and many designs are not frozen at this > point and may still change heavily. > To become really good, the project needs to still make a bunch of > iterations (no pun intended) and change many things quickly. > > - The Stateful Functions project will likely try to release very > frequently in its early days, to improve quickly and gather feedback fast. > Being bound to Flink core release cycle would hurt here. > > > I believe that with all those goals, adding Stateful Functions to the Flink > core repository would not make sense. Flink core has processes that make > sense for an established project that needs to guarantee stability. These > processes are simply prohibitive for new projects to develop. > In addition, the Flink main repository is gigantic, has a build system and > CI system that cannot handle the size of the project any more. Not the best > way to start expanding into a new community. > > In some sense, Stateful Functions could make sense as an independent > project, but it is so tightly coupled to Flink right now that I think an > even better fit is a separate repository in Flink. > Think Hive and Hadoop in the early days. That way, we get the synergy > between the two (the same community drives them) while letting both move at > their own speed. > It would somehow mean two closely related projects shepherded by the same > community. > > It might be possible at a later stage to either merge this into Flink core > (once Stateful Functions is more settled) or even spin this out as a > standalone Apache project, if that is how the community develops. > > That is my main motivation. It is not driven primarily by technicalities > like code versioning and dependencies, but much rather by what is the best > setup to develop this as Flink's way to expand its community towards new > users from a different background. > > Curious to hear if that makes sense to you. > > Best, > Stephan >
