[Snowball-discuss] Snowball release cycle ?

[Grant Ingersoll]

Forwarding a private message I sent to Dr. Porter to the list as a  
whole as a possible way of addressing Dr. Porter's desire to code less  
and also the desire for releases, etc.  Dr. Porter's response was that  
I should bring it up within the community to gauge other's interest,  
so here it is:
<snip>
Hi Dr. Porter,

My name is Grant Ingersoll and I am a committer on the Apache Lucene  
project (http://lucene.apache.org), which is a big user of the  
Snowball code.  In reading this message and hearing of your desire not  
to code anymore, it occurred to me that maybe the Snowball project  
would be interested in becoming a part of the Apache Software  
Foundation, whereby it can get attention from a community of  
developers/committers.  For instance, just the other day, I was  
thinking about a performance improvement that we could use in Lucene  
land that would allow passing in a char [] array instead of a String  
to the stemmer, since all of our Token objects are represented that  
way and it now forces us to construct a new String every time.

If you're interested, let me know and we can figure out where to go  
from here.  The donation process for projects outside of the ASF is  
pretty easy and I would propose that it become a sub-project of the  
Lucene project, so you can know it will be in good hands.  Naturally,  
you and Richard would also be committers on the project, so you could  
still be involved as much as you like.

At any rate, thanks for the great piece of software.

Cheers,
Grant Ingersoll
</snip>

So, what do others think about donating the Snowball stemmers to the  
ASF and in particular the Lucene project?  Snowball would likely be a  
subproject of Lucene (like Solr, Mahout, etc.) and people could  
contribute patches, become committers, etc. just as any other ASF  
project, i.e. based on merit.

-Grant


On Apr 1, 2009, at 4:16 AM, Martin Porter wrote:

>
> Oleg,
>
> Hello, nice to hear from you you again, after so long. Richard and I  
> have
> discussed the idea of having a proper release policy from time to  
> time, but
> have never managed to put one in place. I think that is acceptable,  
> since
> snowball changes less and less as the years go by. (I am 65 now, and  
> want to
> withdraw from software work in the future.)
>
> As well as the snowball compiler, I have no plans to alter the  
> stemmers
> themselves (except perhaps the English stemmer -- I have thought of  
> undoing
> or modifying an earlier extension.) The version we're currently  
> releasing is
> just as stable as the one you used in 2007, and probably little  
> different.


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