>I would really like to see the isolation feature in 0.94+, so I intend to >work with Jia and, if there is a successful result, support it going >forward in a manner like Stargate, even though I may not run it >personally (like I don't run Stargate). I take an expansive view of what >open source projects should accept... > >On the other hand there are users and committers of HBase for whom >stability is paramount. I expect the tension :-); it will make us a >healthier project. > >But we cannot have a new feature acceptance criteria that requires >several "core users" run it in production.
I think we should be really careful here because a laissez-fare attitude will keep the project from reaching a new level of maturity. There are a number of committers from various companies who are using this for business-critical applications, want to provide users with a build that they can use for business-critical applications, and independently coming to the same conclusion that we need a more stable trunk. In fact, it was important enough for us to discuss in depth at the HBase pow-pow a couple weeks ago, with 30+? people. There are other open source projects out there that aren't used for as critical data and would love to have that next feature that might differentiate them. As a maturing product, we don't need a ton of new features as much as we need our features to work properly and have some well-thought tweaks for completeness. That said, this thread has been split between a discussion about HBASE-4120 and a discussion about open source inclusivity. I appreciate the effort that Tao Bao is putting into HBASE-4120. I'm glad that they have plans to use this in a production environment. I'm glad to hear that there are active companies that also want to use this feature in a critical environment. That said, I gave an initial scan for HBASE-4120 and found race conditions & necessary design refactoring. This was just an introductory scan, so I didn't look very hard and expected to find more issues in a later scan. I have not looked at the diff recently because of prod release issues; but I find it disturbing that other reviewers didn't find those issues, since I waited over a month to review that patch. I would expect that a committer wanting to use this feature in his company for production would do a much more thorough analysis than I did.
