[Snowball-discuss] Snowball release cycle ?

[Dawid Weiss]

Hello all,

I strongly support Grant's kind request to move Snowball under Apache umbrella. 
It would not take anything away from the project's prestigious status and at the 
same time the number of people actively using Snowball (and willing to improve 
it) would dramatically increase.

Dawid


Grant Ingersoll wrote:
> 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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