Hello again, Has the time come for us to reduce scope to move faster and with more focus? Even for those not in the cloud, SolrCloud has been the undisputed performance and usability champ since version 8.0. In version 9.0, I'd like to propose that the deciders in the community deprecate standalone mode in favor of SolrCloud.
There are a few drivers: 1. We only need to support changes that impact SolrCloud going forward. I know that this is hard to stomach. But by the time Solr reaches version 10.0, everyone should have migrated to SolrCloud as there is little reason to continue to run standalone. 2. The new features keep coming to SolrCloud, but not to standalone. You can see in a few ways how I embarrassingly discovered this late one night while trying out a PR. If not careful, users can accidentally start Solr in standalone mode. Think of all the features that they will see documented but not in their environment. What a confusing user experience? 3. Last but certainly not least, the number of contributors to the project, and the velocity of those contributions has dropped. . It does not have to be that way, though. Two ways are for the community to observe our push for modernization and improved user experience. Simply eliminating the need to include the -c flag in the start command would be a huge win for many engineers.We should make life easier for our users as much as the maintainers here. We can strive to make the upgrade process from 9 to 10 very simple. I tried to make one step in this direction last year by re-ordering the README to show the Solr Cloud command before the standalone command. I believe that patch died on the vine, but I would be excited to revive it to document this effort when the time is appropriate. Reason not to do it: 1. Some large company out there might view this move as introducing risk. I view the risk here as negligible but I welcome any perspective there. 2. Some things I inevitably don't know. What do you all think? Thank you all for your voluntary contributions, -- Marcus Eagan
