Status: In Progress · Proposal
August 2026¶
Summary of Work Completed¶
During this period, work revolved around preparation work for Spark 4 support then actual Spark 4 support, finishing getting Almond using its fork of its Ammonite dependency (that backs its Scala REPL support), and getting the Almond repositories (Almond itself, its Ammonite fork, ammonite-spark) ready for new releases taking into account Maven Central new publishing limits.
ammonite-spark’s build was refactored, in order to have non-regression tests for many more
Spark versions, not just a handful of them (alexarchambault
Actual support for Spark 4 was added later on, on top of that (alexarchambault
Almond’s Ammonite fork was put in shape for Almond’s needs and for easier maintenance (almond
Almond, alongside ammonite-spark, switched to using its Ammonite fork (almond
Still aiming at respecting Maven Central new publishing limits, work is on-going to limit the number of modules published by Almond
while not dropping features (almond
Some user proposed changes were reworked (almond
Deliverables/Milestones¶
New features of bug fixes were merged (Spark 4 support, user-reported issues just above), Almond now relies on its fork of Ammonite. But all of this awaits releases (see next steps).
Challenges or Risks¶
Mostly about time: time spent working on this is a bit behind schedule, but things should be much better now, now that I have a solid AI workflow, and that the holiday period is behind us.
Budget Update¶
4.5 days of work done since the last report, so 8 days of work done overall, over 39.5 days planned
Next Steps¶
Finishing getting the Almond repository ready for new releases (more respectful of the new Maven Central publishing limits) and actually cutting releases for Almond and ammonite-spark
Starting work on rehauling the documentation
Triaging / addressing GitHub issues
June 2026¶
Summary of Work Completed¶
During this period, mainly on-going work for Spark 4 support, and some more CI stabilization
Updated and refactored the build and CI of satellite project ammonite-spark (which brings Spark support to Almond), in order to test and support more Spark versions in the future (alexarchambault
/ammonite -spark #481, alexarchambault /ammonite -spark #487, alexarchambault /ammonite -spark #488, alexarchambault /ammonite -spark #489, alexarchambault /ammonite -spark #491) Moved the lightweight
-spark -distrib repo, used by ammonite-spark, to the Almond organization, and started working on making it support more Spark versions (almond -sh /lightweight -spark -distrib#1) More work on stabilizing Almond’s CI (almond
-sh /almond #1692, almond -sh /almond #1693, almond -sh /almond #1700, almond -sh /almond #1701)
Deliverables/Milestones¶
Nothing to report yet, apart from more stable CIs and updated builds
Challenges or Risks¶
Minor: testing Spark 4 support on the CI when Spark runs on YARN should require emulating a minimal YARN 3 cluster, while the existing tests only emulate a YARN 2 one. But the help of LLMs should greatly lower the time needed to get that working.
Budget Update¶
2.5 days of work done since the last report, so 3.5 days of work done overall, over 39.5 days planned
Next Steps¶
Adding Spark 4 support in ammonite-spark (which provides Spark support in Almond)
Use Almond’s Ammonite fork (set up during the last report period) in Almond itself
April 2026¶
Summary of Work Completed¶
Mainly updates, stabilizing CI, on-going work on bugs and satellite projects
New attempts at working around transient errors on CI (almond
-sh /almond #1661), to streamline automated updates and agent work - somewhat successful, more tweaking to come (almond -sh /almond #1664) work on-going (alexarchambault
/ammonite -spark #481) to update the build of satellite project ammonite-spark, required to fix publishing to Maven Central work on-going to set up a fork of the Ammonite project that Almond relies on (Ammonite’s author deprecated it, as he focuses on Scala 3, and some Ammonite features have been added to the default Scala 3 REPL. In Almond, we still need Scala 2 support, in particular for Spark users, so we need to keep Ammonite alive and maintained.)
Work on-going (almond
-sh /almond #1666) on fix for issue reported by Netflix users (almond -sh /almond #1499)
Deliverables/Milestones¶
Nothing to report yet, work has just started
Challenges or Risks¶
Nothing to report here
Budget Update¶
One day of work over 39.5 days planned
Next Steps¶
Keep updating things and stabilizing CI, reviewing opened issues and trying to get agents to work on issues or explore things to help address them