Ray Enhancement Proposals

This repo tracks Ray Enhancement Proposals (REP). The REP process is the main way to propose, discuss, and decide on features and other major changes to the Ray project. We'll start with a simple decision-making process (and evolve it over time):.

• First, a draft PR is created against the repo with a draft REP. A senior Ray committer should be designated as the shepherd in the Stewardship section and assigned to the PR.
• The shepherd will review the PR and get it into a polished state for further review by Ray committers.
• Once the PR is reviewable, we will hold a vote on the ray-committers mailing list. In most cases this should reach consensus; if the result is not unanimous, Eric Liang (@ericl) and Philipp Moritz (@pcmoritz) will be the final deciders on whether to accept the change.
• Based on the results of the vote and possible final decision, the PR will either be merged (REP approved) or closed (REP rejected) with a short summary of the decision.

You can find a list of PRs for REPs here (both open and merged PRs are available for comment): https://github.com/ray-project/enhancements/pulls?q=is%3Apr

Each REP should include the following information:

Summary

General Motivation

What use cases is this proposal supposed to enhance. If possible, please include details like the environment and scale.

Should this change be within ray or outside?

From a software layering perspective, should this change be part of the main ray project, part of an ecosystem project under ray-project, or a new ecosystem project?

When reviewing the REP, the reviewers and the shepherd should apply the following judgements:

• If an author proposes a change to be within the ray repo, the reviewers and the shepherd should assess whether the change can be layered on top of ray instead. If so we should try to make the change in a separate repo.
• For a change proposed as an ecosystem project under ray-project: the reviewers and the shepherd should make sure that the technical quality meets the bar of (at least) a good "experimental" or "alpha" feature -- we should be comfortable welcoming Ray users with similar use cases to try this project.
• For a change proposed as a new ecosystem project (outside of ray-project): then this REP is just serving as a "request for comments". We don't need to go through the voting process, since it's not Ray committers' decision to approve the change.

Stewardship

Required Reviewers

The proposal will be open to the public, but please suggest a few experienced Ray contributors in this technical domain whose comments will help this proposal. Ideally, the list should include Ray committers.

Shepherd of the Proposal (should be a senior committer)

To make the review process more productive, the owner of each proposal should identify a shepherd (should be a senior Ray committer). The shepherd is responsible for working with the owner and making sure the proposal is in good shape (with necessary information) before marking it as ready for broader review.

Design and Architecture

The proposal should include sufficient technical details for reviewers to determine the anticipated benefits and risks.

Compatibility, Deprecation, and Migration Plan

An important part of the proposal is to explicitly point out any compability implications of the proposed change. If there is any, we should thouroughly discuss a plan to deprecate existing APIs and migration to the new one(s).

Test Plan and Acceptance Criteria

The proposal should discuss how the change will be tested before it can be merged or enabled. It should also include other acceptance criteria including documentation and examples.

(Optional) Follow-on Work

Optionally, the proposal should discuss necessary follow-on work after the change is accepted.