OpenNLP Improvement Proposals

Disclaimer: Everything on this page is a shameless copy-paste-replaceText("FLIP").with("ONIP") from Apache Flink - Flink Improvement Proposals

This page describes a proposed OpenNLP Improvement Proposal (ONIP) process for proposing a major change to OpenNLP.

To create your own ONIP, click on "Create" on the header and choose "ONIP-Template" other than "Blank page".

What should be included in an ONIP?

A ONIP should contain the following sections:

• Motivation: describe the problem to be solved
• Proposed Change: describe the new thing you want to do. This may be fairly extensive and have large subsections of its own. Or it may be a few sentences, depending on the scope of the change.
• New or Changed Public Interfaces: impact to any of the "compatibility commitments" described above. We want to call these out in particular so everyone thinks about them.
• Migration Plan and Compatibility: if this feature requires additional support for a no-downtime upgrade describe how that will work
• Rejected Alternatives: What are the other alternatives you considered and why are they worse? The goal of this section is to help people understand why this is the best solution now, and also to prevent churn in the future when old alternatives are reconsidered.

Who should initiate an ONIP?

Anyone can initiate an ONIP but you shouldn't do it unless you have an intention of getting the work done to implement it.

Process

Here is the process for making an ONIP:

1. Create a page which is a child of this one. Take the next available ONIP number and give your proposal a descriptive heading. e.g. "ONIP 76: Better Tokenizer for Long Text". If you don't have the necessary permissions for creating a new page, please ask on the development mailing list.
2. Fill in the sections as described above
3. Start a [DISCUSS] thread on the Apache mailing list. Please ensure that the subject of the thread is of the format [DISCUSS] ONIP-{your ONIP number} {your ONIP heading} The discussion should happen on the mailing list not on the wiki since the wiki comment system doesn't work well for larger discussions. In the process of the discussion you may update the proposal. You should let people know the changes you are making.
4. Once the proposal is finalized call a [VOTE] to have the proposal adopted. These proposals are more serious than code changes and more serious even than release votes. The criteria for acceptance is lazy majority.
5. Please update the ONIP wiki page, and the index below, to reflect the current stage of the ONIP after a vote. This acts as the permanent record indicating the result of the ONIP (e.g., Accepted or Rejected). Also report the result of the ONIP vote to the voting thread on the mailing list so the conclusion is clear.

ONIP round-up

Next ONIP Number: 3

Use this number as the identifier for your ONIP and increment this value.

Adopted/Accepted but unreleased ONIPs

ONIPs under discussion