Bug#786460: ITP: kafka -- Distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service

[Faidon Liambotis <paravoid@debian.org>]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 07:44:05AM -0500, Brandon Bradley wrote:
> I have multiple reasons for not contacting Wikimedia or using their work.
> The possibility of them having additions for their own purposes is very
> high. I believe starting fresh was easier than analyzing and debugging
> their repo.

Don't guess, ask :)

That particular package has been prepared and is maintained by my team
at the Wikimedia Foundation, which incidentally has 3 DDs (Filippo
Giunchedi, Moritz Mühlenhoff and myself) in it, plus at least a couple
of other people with Debian packaging expertise.

At Wikimedia, we're using Kafka extensively. We're obviously very keen
on pushing things upstream too, which why e.g. I already pushed our
librdkafka package in Debian (already part of jessie). Vincent Bernat
also worked on kafkacat (from the same upstream) which we also use, so
we collaborated and now jointly comaintain each other's packages. We're
definitely not trying to work in a silo :)

We haven't attempted to push the "main" Kafka package to Debian, since
our time was limited and the packaging was a bit hacky/get-the-job-done
(e.g. replacing the complex build system that downloads jars off the
Internet by a Makefile), plus, JVM packages are usually harder to
maintain properly :)

I've been quietly watching this ITP, though, and we would definitely be
interested to join efforts and switch to better, properly maintained
packages, if there is enough momentum from people that want to see this
in Debian.

Time is (always) limited but I'd be more than happy to
review/mentor/upload. I'll also convey this whole conversation
internally to my team, maybe we can pull some resources for this, if
you're interested in collaborating.

Best,
Faidon