General Comments
A serious conflict broke out between two major developers of FOP. The focus of the conflict was code quality. One developer insists on more effort to extract common behaviour and to add abstraction. He feels that this will make the code easier to maintain, that these features are currently lacking in FOP's code, and that this makes it hard for new contributors to enter. The other developer feels that this will require more time and effort than he can put into the code, and that the requirements are too theoretical and not compatible with his way of thinking about the implementation of new functionality. Examples of discussions can be found in the archives of the fop-dev email list in February and March. Initially the conflict was resolved by mediation of another FOP developer. Unfortunately, the emotional damage was not restored, and Jeremias Märki decided to step down as chairman of the XML Graphics PMC and take a timeout from FOP. This is certainly a great loss for the project.
Simon Pepping was elected by the PMC to be the successor. A resolution for the change has been submitted to the board (see mail to board@).
XML Graphics Commons
No releases, no major changes, just a few improvements and fixes in various components.
Batik
Same as last time: Not much going on. A little bugfixing and code cleanup. Activity on the users mailing list seems stable. One contributor is working through past issues in Bugzilla to make the uncommitted patches in there more visible and to get another pair of eyes on them.
FOP
The 1.0 beta release we discussed during the previous quarter hasn't happened, yet.
Research for an improved approach at page breaking is making progress.
We've received a major patch from a contributor that adds Tagged PDF support to Apache FOP. This has been processed and the code is available in a development branch. After that support for PDF/A-1a has been added based on this new functionality. The branch is largely ready to be merged back but this hasn't happened, yet.
Besides that we've seen a steady stream of bugfixes and minor new features, a small number of patches, too. The user mailing lists activity seems steady.