• Status
• Motivation
• Audience
• Goals
• Non-Goals
• Proposed Changes
• New or Changed Public Interfaces
• Compatibility, Deprecation, and Migration Plan
• Test Plan
• Rejected Alternatives

Status

Current state: Proposed

Discussion thread:

...

Please keep the discussion on the mailing list rather than commenting on the wiki (wiki discussions get unwieldy fast).

Motivation

Today, users who need the CQLSH client are forced to download the full Cassandra binaries, including the server components which they don’t need. This download is approximately 50 megabytes. The CQLSH client is only 110 KB.

...

This CEP proposes an official distribution of CQLSH on PyPI and to incorporate this distribution into the Apache Cassandra release process.

Audience

Cassandra end users who wish to use only the CQLSH client

Goals

Publishing a CQLSH python package on PyPI.org with the contribution of the existing third-party package will provide the following benefits for the Apache Cassandra project:

• An official Apache client distribution of CQLSH which does not include the server-side components. For users, this will be as simple as ‘pip install cqlsh’.
• Python console script declaration to create a Windows executable .EXE, which does not require path setup.
• A CQLSH package that can be imported and used by Python developers. For example, a Jupyter kernel.

Non-Goals

• No change to existing functionality for RPM, tarball, or brew installations.
• Changing the existing versioning scheme for CQLSH. This topic has been raised on the mailing list and merits further discussion but is outside the scope of this  CEP, which is solely about transferring ownership of publishing the current Python package

Proposed Changes

We propose the following changes to integrate the project into the Apache Cassandra source code base 

1. Incorporate and add the following files:
   1. README.md for the pypi.org project page
   2. pyproject.toml
   3. setup.cfg
   4. setup.py
   5. pylib/cqlshlib/__init__.py
   6. pylib/cqlshlib/__main__.py
2. A document detailing procedures for releasing to PyPI.org. This document should include details on:
   1. How release to PyPI can be integrated into the build process. Can this be done with automation? 
   2. How will credentials, permissions and ownership of packages on PyPI be managed?

New or Changed Public Interfaces

<tbd>

Compatibility, Deprecation, and Migration Plan

• What impact (if any) will there be on existing users?

...

• When will we remove the existing behavior?

Not applicable

Test Plan

• Successful integration tests
• For any additional requirements from the Cassandra community, will seek guidance on the discussion thread

Rejected Alternatives

Existing Unofficial Repository

While the current repository has proven popular, with over 40,000 downloads per month, its existence outside of the Apache project has resulted in it being maintained by just one or two individuals. It also requires copying and duplicating the code base into a separate repo. It’s also less secure as there is no guarantee that the PyPi package matches the distribution code on Apache GitHub, such as potentially including malware.

Anaconda

As a pure Python package, CQLSH is better supported with the default package installer for Python. Anaconda packages exist for CQLSH, but are not currently maintained. If there is enough interest in an Anaconda package, this should be discussed in a separate CEP.