Sure. As I said before, they are not mutually exclusive. Just stating my experience that specs without a test suite are of no use. If I were to prioritize, I would give priority to a TCK over natural-language specs. That's all.
So far, I have seen many replacements for HDFS as InputFormat and OutputFormat that reads from or writes to different data sources and syncs only. It is easily imaginable to have a pluggable app managers and resource manager after MR-279 (other than local, which is part of Apache Hadoop, but not "compatible", think distributed cache). So, we would need a spec and a test suite per component (I.e. App manager, resource manager, current scheduler, replication target chooser, authentication, authorization) now. If the binary protocols were to be crystallized, I can imagine others implementing only the datanode, or a task tracker. So we would need protocol-level compatibility suite for individual daemons as well. I agree with one of the statements that Steve L made, that "Hadoop has an enviable problem of too much activity." If one follows the activities in commercial world, open source, academic and industry-sponsored R&D, one quickly realizes that writing RFCs for all the above components and fixing them without versioning is cumbersome and difficult optimistically, and near impossible realistically. Also, my experience is that keeping standards documentation for an evolving technology up-to-date with the proper implementation is a pipe-dream at best. A test suite that gets compiled and run every time a new version comes out is within the realm of possibility. Therefore, all I am saying is that, while a POSIX-like spec is a "nice to have", a test-suite that defines compatibility is a must. - milind -- Milind Bhandarkar mbhandar...@linkedin.com +1-650-776-3167 On 5/12/11 10:38 PM, "Ted Dunning" <tdunn...@maprtech.com> wrote: >I would say that an English spec with associated test suite is a middle >ground. > >On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 9:52 PM, Milind Bhandarkar ><mbhandar...@linkedin.com >> wrote: > >> Ok, my mistake. They have only asked for documented specifications. I >>may >> have been influenced by all the specifications I have read. All of them >> were in English, which is characterized as a natural language. >> >> But then, if you are proposing a specification in a >>non-natural-language, >> isn't that called a test suite ? Or is there a middle ground ? >> >> - milind >> >> -- >> Milind Bhandarkar >> mbhandar...@linkedin.com >> +1-650-776-3167 >> >> >> >> >> >> >> On 5/12/11 9:05 PM, "Ted Dunning" <tdunn...@maprtech.com> wrote: >> >> >Did anybody propose natural language only specifications? >>
