On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 8:24 PM, Grant Ingersoll <[email protected]> wrote:
> It should also be noted that a good chunk of the Solr committers are already > Lucene committers, and of the remaining there are: Bill Au, Mike Klaas, Ryan > McKinley, Shalin and Noble. Mike has been inactive for quite some time (and > has elected to go emeritus even though it's not marked on the page) and and > Ryan, Shalin and Noble already contribute to Lucene in various parts > (AFAICT), so to me it's not a big stretch to say bring them into the fold. I > haven't tracked Bill's involvement, but I also know Bill and trust he knows > what it means to be a committer, i.e. he knows as much what not to touch as > what to touch. Of course, we can do a separate vote on that if that helps > satisfy Chris' issue on the committers. I don't expect that it makes much of a difference either way, but feel free to leave me out of the Lucene auto-committership should that be an issue. I don't expect to become an active committer in the near future. > In the end, for me anyway, the current separation hurts Lucene a good deal as > much as it hurts Solr, if not more. Agreed. The central issue is that Solr committers often work on features which are core to "full-text search" rather than "an HTTP full-text search server". The parts of the features related to full-text search would improve Lucene (the fact that Solr is used by people as a library in an embedded context provides glaring testament to that). But they don't end up there, due to the friction of simultaneously developing a feature in two projects that aren't synchronized. Does this happen often? It does. I'd say over 50% of my non-trivial changes to Solr could have been useful in Lucene. (This is probably not representative of the entire Solr committerdom, of course.) In fact, the *very first patch* I developed for Solr was adding in hit highlighting, and I ended up copy&pasting a class from contrib Highlighter to extend it. Of course, I was a committer for neither project at the time; I don't want to think about the logistics of trying to submit patches to both projects which are so inter-dependent (and would pretty much rely on review by someone who was a committer on both projects anyway). I think someone could make an argument that I should have been more conscientious about submitting patches to Lucene, and they are probably right. But, I ultimately wasn't, and many other committers weren't as well (even those who were committers for both projects), and so we've ended up in this situation where we really have *three* projects: Lucene, the java search library, Lucene+, the set of improvements and extensions to Lucene which could be in Lucene itself and developed by the same people as Lucene, and Solr, the HTTP server around Lucene. The Lucene Project as a whole would benefit if this situation were improved. Auto-syncing Lucene-trunk with Solr would bring an improvement, but it isn't a fundamental solution and has its own set of problems. The current proposal seems reasonable, but I worry about the level of contention it is receiving. +0 -Mike
