Pat, it can't be as high-level or as dteailed as it can be, I don't care, as long as it doesn't contain misstatements. It simply can state "we adhere to the "Apache's power of doing" principle and accept new contributions". This is ok with me. But, as offered, it does try to enumerate strategic directions, and in doing so, its wording is either vague, or incomplete, or just wrong.
For example, it says "it is clear that what the committers are working on is Spark". This is less than accurate. First, if I interpret it literally, it is wrong, as our committers for most part are not working on Spark, and even if they do, to whatever negligible degree it esxists, why Mahout would care. Second, if it is meant to say "we develop algorithms for Spark", this is also wrong, because whatever algorithms we have added to day, have 0 Spark dependencies. Third, if it is meant to say that majority of what we are working on is Spark bindings, this is still incorrect. Head count-wise, Mahout-math tweaks and Scala enablement were at least a big effort. Hadoop 2.0 stuff was at least as big. Documentation and tutorial work engagement was absolute leader headcount-wise to date. The problem i am trying to explain here is that we obviously internally know what we are doing; but this is for external consumption so we have to be careful to avoid miscommunication here. It is easy for us to pass on less than accurate info delivery exactly because we already know what we are doing and therefore our brain is happy to jump to conclusions and make up the missing connections between stated and implied as we see it. But for an outsider, this would sound vague or make him make wrong connections. On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 9:54 AM, Pat Ferrel <[email protected]> wrote: > This doesn’t seem to be a vision statement. I was +1 to a simple consensus > statement. > > The vision is up to you. > > We have an interactive shell that scales to huge datasets without > resorting to massive subsampling. One that allows you to deal with the > exact data your black box algos work on. Every data tool has an interactive > mode except Mahout—now it does. Virtually every complex transform as well > as basic linear algebra works on massive datasets. The interactivity will > allow people to do things with Mahout they could never do before. > > We also have the building blocks to make the fastest most flexible cutting > edge collaborative filtering+metadata recommenders in the world. Honestly I > don’t see anything like this elsewhere. We will also be able to fit into > virtually any workflow and directly consume data produced in those systems > with no intermediate scrubbing. This has never happened before in Mahout > and I don’t see it in MLlib either. Even the interactive shell will benefit > from this. > > Other feature champions will be able to add to this list. > > Seems like the vision comes from feature champions. I may not use Mahout > in the same way you do but I rely on your code. Maybe I serve a different > user type than you. I don’t see a problem with that, do you? > > On May 6, 2014, at 2:32 PM, Dmitriy Lyubimov <[email protected]> wrote: > > Pat et. al, > > The whole problem with original suggested consensus statement is that it > reads as "we are building MLLib for Spark (oh wait, there's already such a > thing)" and then "we are building MLLib for 0xdata" and then perhaps for > something else. Which can't be farther from the true philosophy of what has > been done. If not it, then at best it reads as "we don't know what it is we > are building, but we are including some Spark dependencies now". So it is > either misleading, or sufficiently vague, not sure which is worse. > > If a collection of backend-specific separated MLLibs is the new consensus, > i can't say i can share it. In fact, the only motivation for me to do > anything within this project was to fix everything that (per my perhaps > lopsided perception) is less than ideal with the approach of building ML > projects as backend-specific collections of black-box trainers and solvers > and bring in an ideology similar to Julia and R to the jvm-based big data > ML . > > If users are to love us, somehow i think it will not be because we ported > yet another flavor of K-means to Spark. > > At this point I think it is a little premature to talk about an existing > consensus, it seems. > > On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 12:41 PM, Pat Ferrel <[email protected]> wrote: > > > +1 > > > > I personally won’t spend a lot of time generalizing right now. > > Contributors can help with that if they want or make suggestions. > > > > On May 6, 2014, at 9:23 AM, Ted Dunning <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > As a bit of commentary, it is clear that what the committers are working > on > > is Spark > > > > Mahout committers, with very rare exceptions, are not working on Spark. > Spark committers and contributors are working on Spark. > >
