All valid points by the many who have responded. Thanks! When I woke up this morning, I thought maybe we should postpone until 0.3 is out, so it is good to see this expressed here as well.
As for concerns about overhead, infra@ will take care of most of the heavy lifting (new mailing lists, migrating everyone over to the new ones). We would need to move our website and put up a redirect, but that is trivial. We'd also have to move our SVN, but that is trivial as well. At the PMC level, the ASF seems to vary quite a bit here, AFAICT. Lucene is pretty low key and very low volume and the subprojects pretty much run themselves. I would suspect that Mahout would be the same given our roots. Another thought is that we time it w/ a 1.0 release and come in with a big bang including press releases, etc. On the other hand, if we do it sooner (after 0.3), we can do two press releases, one for the move and one for the 1.0 release. This would give more exposure overall. Finally, it's not clear the ASF likes lots of subprojects, so we'd need to be careful there. Either that or we just have all committers be committers across all the subs. Then again, it probably isn't a huge deal. Lucene and Hadoop are the two primary examples of projects w/ subs and they are both well run, successful projects. In the end, I still am +1, but think it makes sense to wait until after 0.3. Besides, since the next board meeting is Wednesday, this will give us more time to think about it. -Grant On Feb 13, 2010, at 3:55 AM, Kay Kay wrote: > 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 >> >
