Team, We've discussed this a bit over the years in various forms but it again seems time to progress this topic and enough has changed I think to warrant it.
Tensions: 1) Our build times take too long. In travis-ci for instance it takes 40 minutes when it works. 2) The number of builds we do has increased. We do us/jp/fr builds on open and oracle JDKs. That is 6 builds. 3) We want to add Java 11 support such that one could build with 8 or 11 and the above still apply. The becomes 6 builds. 4) With the progress in NiFi registry we can now load artifacts there and could pull them into NiFi. And this integration will only get better. 5) The NiFi build is too huge and cannot grow any longer or else we cannot upload convenience binaries. We cannot solve all the things just yet but we can make progress. I suggest we split apart the NiFi 'framework/application' in its own release cycle and code repository from the 'nifi extensions' into its own repository and release cycle. The NiFi release would still pull in a specific set of extension bundles so to our end users at this time there is no change. In the future we could also just stop including the extensions in nifi the application and they could be sourced at runtime as needed from the registry (call that a NiFi 2.x thing). Why does this help? - Builds would only take as long as just extensions take or just core/app takes. This reduces time for each change cycle and reduces load on travis-ci which runs the same tests over and over and over for each pull request/push regardless of whether it was an extension or core. - It moves us toward the direction we're heading anyway whereby extensions can have their own lifecycle from the framework/app itself. How is this not awesome: - Doesn't yet solve for the large builds problem. I think we'll get there with a NiFi 2.x release which fully leverages nifi-registry for retrieval of all extensions. - Adds another 'thing we need to do a release cycle for'. This is generally unpleasant but it is paid for once a release cycle and it does allow us to release independently for new cool extensions/fixes apart from the framework itself. Would be great to hear others thoughts if they too feel it is time to make this happen. Thanks Joe
