Hi,
As many of you now we are actively working on Load-Store redesign for Pig. This work is documented in http://wiki.apache.org/pig/LoadStoreRedesignProposal and is happening on a separate branch with intent to merge is back into the trunk early next year. We need to figure out a way to keep the L-S redesign branch as close as possible to the trunk. Here is the proposal. Please, let us know what you think. We need to periodically merge from trunk to the branch. Most code will merge as is. However, the changes in the area of Hadoop integration or Input/OutputFormat handling will be tricky. For those (hopefully few) patches, the proposal is to make the owner of the patch to create a L-S redesign compatible patch and get it applied directly to the branch. The second part is to make sure that the patch from the trunk is not applied at the time of the next merge. Currently, merges are done starting from the point of the last merge. The information of the last SVN number is recorded in the commit message of the previous merge and can be found from the svn log. The following modification to the process is proposed to accommodate the patches that need different versions for trunk and L-S branch: (0) Lock the trunk and the branch for the duration of the merge and patch application. (1) Synch the L-S branch to the point of the patch on the trunk (2) Apply the patch to both the trunk and the branch (3) Record the SVN number that resulted after the patch has been applied to the trunk is. (This basically skips the just committed patch from the next merge.) Olga