Sorry, I sent this on Friday but forgot to change the sender to my ASF
account and my gmail gets blocked for some reason. I wanted to cover why I
think it is both reasonable and important to continue with the vote even
though there are questions about what happens after we decide to
use versions.

Antoine said:
> Well, the above shows that it's not exactly clear what is being voted
> on, yet. At least it's not clear to me and potentially other bystanders.
> I assume it's clear to you :-)

I think this is the key issue for the vote, so I want to address it to
explain why I think it's important to continue.

>From my perspective, we spent more than a month discussing versions vs
presets (that is, release by vote with numeric labels vs mechanistic with
time-based labels). To make my perspective easier to see, I'll use an
analogy: we want to make juice and had a long discussion over Apples vs
Oranges.

That discussion trailed off 2 weeks ago. I had noted that we're really just
trying to decide between Apples and Oranges. We discussed this in the
Parquet sync to see if anyone else (not on the discuss thread) had a strong
opinion. It appeared that we had said all we needed to about the choice of
Apples vs Oranges.

So I started a vote to affirm what I think is the clear community
preference for Apples (only 2 exceptions).

Continuing with the analogy a little further, I'm confused because the
objections are (1) "Can you even juice an Apple?" and (2) "Is this a vote
to choose Apples vs Oranges?". For (1), we have examples that this works.
And for (2), I'm struggling to see how this wasn't clear from the context. The
idea is simply to make a call on the decision point we outlined in our
discussion. (I hope the analogy helps make my perspective easier to
understand.)

I also think it is important to leave the vote open. I understand the ask:
to write a document on how versions work. But exactly what it means to bump
the minor version of parquet-format is unrelated to our decision to use a
vote to release new format versions. We should focus on the decision point
at hand. In addition, I think it is positive that this has sparked interest
in learning how versioning a format works, so I am reluctant to cancel the
vote only to return to silence.

Hopefully that makes my thinking clear. Next, how do we move forward?

Antoine, what if you, Julien, and I work together to finalize Julien's doc
about how versions will work? That way you can ensure the proposal meets
your expectations and I can see that we are making progress. Would that
work for you?



On Thu, Jul 9, 2026 at 11:05 PM Antoine Pitrou <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> Le 09/07/2026 à 23:00, Ryan Blue a écrit :
> >> The previous thread was entitled "[DISCUSS] Moving to SemVer for
> >> parquet-format releases". :-)
> >
> > We should not conflate parquet-format releases with versions of the
> Parquet
> > spec. Much of the spec is defined in the thrift file of that release, but
> > it's not the same thing.
>
> I very well hope that we make it the same thing. We have too many
> version numbers already, we don't want to add another one yet.
>
> I certainly assumed that your vote applied to parquet-format releases
> and wasn't proposing a separate versioning space...
>
> >> That's a good point. It deserves encoding somewhere, IMHO.
> >
> > How about a vote?
>
> Well, the above shows that it's not exactly clear what is being voted
> on, yet. At least it's not clear to me and potentially other bystanders.
> I assume it's clear to you :-)
>
> Regards
>
> Antoine.
>
>
>

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