As a lurker around in this community and an active user myself,
expressing mine for whatever it is worth.
I am happy with the decoupling of ML from Search, with the former
warranting a separate attention to itself. So, +1 on this happening
eventually to be more independent, but my reservation has to do with the
timing of it and specifically the versioning of it, and how close would
a 1.0 release be feasible once this becomes a TLP.
On 02/12/2010 02:44 PM, Grant Ingersoll wrote:
As many of you know, Mahout has been growing pretty quickly and has also
reached a critical mass. I, along with some others in the Mahout community,
feel it would make sense for Mahout to become a TLP With this in mind, I've
submitted a proposal to the Lucene PMC to ask the board to make Mahout an
Apache TLP. One of the feedbacks from the PMC was question as to whether this
has been discussed in the community and whether the community is for it. I
know it's been brought up tangentially in the past (see [1], [2], [3]) and
there wasn't any disagreement, but it seems it warrants a more formal
discussion.
I see the following pros:
1. We'd like to organize several subprojects we wish to introduce (Core, NLP,
Recommenders/Taste, Ports - C++, etc.) that wouldn't really fit as Lucene
subprojects.
2. I also think longer term that while Machine Learning and Search are often
related, they are not required of each other and that Mahout would be better
aligned with a more narrow focus of Machine Learning only.
3. The PMC can be more narrowly focused on Mahout and it's needs and will be
better informed of Mahout's contributors, etc.
Cons:
1. Lucene has a very strong brand and I have no doubt that Mahout benefits from
that association
2. Changing mailing lists, etc. is a bit of a hassle (mostly for
infrastructure), but not that big of a deal. Still, Lucene is well established
and well-run, so sometimes inertia is a good thing.
At the end of the day, I'm +1.
[1]
http://search.lucidimagination.com/search/document/a6e03af2952ff196/possible_contribution_at_somewhat_of_a_tangent_to_mahout#5a41be454d503779
[2]
http://search.lucidimagination.com/search/document/40c4c4ec11ca07b5/mi_clustering#7197ef846b384e4e
[3]
http://search.lucidimagination.com/search/document/1817a5e65c83bae3/proposing_a_c_port_for_apache_mahout#8e4e8eabc945264d
