Incubator PMC report for October 2019

The Apache Incubator is the entry path into the ASF for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the Foundation's efforts.

TODO add arrative

Community

New IPMC members:

People who left the IPMC:

New Podlings

Podlings that failed to report, expected next month

Graduations

• list podling here

The board has motions for the following:

• Your podling here?

Releases

The following releases entered distribution during the month of September:

IP Clearance

Legal / Trademarks

Infrastructure

Miscellaneous

Credits

Table of Contents Amaterasu
Annotator
BatchEE
Flagon
Gobblin Hudi
Livy
MesaTEE
Milagro
MXNet
TVM
Weex

Amaterasu

Apache Amaterasu is a framework providing continuous deployment for Big Data pipelines.

Amaterasu has been incubating since 2017-09-07.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

How has the community developed since the last report?

How has the project developed since the last report?

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

XXXX-XX-XX

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Are things falling through the cracks? If so, please list any open issues that need to be addressed.

Signed-off-by:

•  (amaterasu) Jean-Baptiste Onofré
  Comments:
•  (amaterasu) Olivier Lamy
  Comments:
•  (amaterasu) Davor Bonaci
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Annotator

Annotator provides annotation enabling code for browsers, servers, and humans.

Annotator has been incubating since 2016-08-30.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

How has the community developed since the last report?

How has the project developed since the last report?

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

XXXX-XX-XX

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Are things falling through the cracks? If so, please list any open issues that need to be addressed.

Signed-off-by:

•  (annotator) Nick Kew
  Comments:
•  (annotator) Steve Blackmon
  Comments:
•  (annotator) Tommaso Teofili
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

BatchEE

         BatchEE projects aims to provide a JBatch implementation (aka

JSR352) and a set of useful extensions for this specification.

BatchEE has been incubating since 2013-10-03.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

How has the community developed since the last report?

How has the project developed since the last report?

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

XXXX-XX-XX

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Are things falling through the cracks? If so, please list any open issues that need to be addressed.

Signed-off-by:

•  (batchee) Jean-Baptiste Onofré
  Comments:
•  (batchee) Olivier Lamy
  Comments:
•  (batchee) Mark Struberg
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Flagon

Flagon is a behavioral logging platform for web pages and apps

Flagon has been incubating since 2016-07-13.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Grow the Flagon Committer/Contributor/Community Base
2. Refine release processes for core analytic product (Distill)
3. Finalize (through vote) Flagon logo, post name change

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

• None at this time.

How has the community developed since the last report?

• continued improving release processes and code base
• continued to generate a wide user base
• discussing collaborations for R&D applications
• the community has organically grown with a new contributors
• the community has begun a refactoring of Flagon-Distill

How has the project developed since the last report?

• Completed major updates to website and repos following name change
• Project maturity roadmaps & release plans (JIRA) are maintained
• JIRA boards continue to be maintained.
• Core product source code is well maintained
• Analytical products are being refactored as of report date
• Continued attention and improvement in Apache Process

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

• 2019-08-21 Flagon UserALE.js (Incubating) 2.0.2
• 2019-07-01 Flagon UserALE.js (Incubating) 2.0.0
• 2019-06-21 Flagon UserALE.js (Incubating) 1.0.0 (ReRelease)

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

• Furkan Kamaci (Mentor) 2019-07-24
• Tim Allison (Mentor) 2019-07-17

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Are things falling through the cracks? If so, please list any open issues that need to be addressed.

• Flagon thanks its new Mentors for their engagement this quarter.

Signed-off-by:

•  (Flagon) Lewis John McGibbney
  Comments: I think it is nearly time for the Flagon PPMC to draft a graduation resolution. I've mentioned this on the mailing list and received feedback on it. Recent releases prove that the release process and quality of source code artifacts are no longer blocking issues. I would like to see Flagon graduate in this next quarter.
•  (Flagon) David Meikle
  Comments:
•  (Flagon) Tim Allison
  Comments:
•  (Flagon) Furkan Kamaci
  Comments: I agree that Apache Flagon is ready for graduation solution as Lewis mentioned on the mailing list.

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Gobblin

Gobblin is a distributed data integration framework that simplifies common aspects of big data integration such as data ingestion, replication, organization and lifecycle management for both streaming and batch data ecosystems.

Gobblin has been incubating since 2017-02-23.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

How has the community developed since the last report?

How has the project developed since the last report?

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

XXXX-XX-XX

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Are things falling through the cracks? If so, please list any open issues that need to be addressed.

Signed-off-by:

•  (gobblin) Jean-Baptiste Onofre
  Comments:
•  (gobblin) Olivier Lamy
  Comments:
•  (gobblin) Jim Jagielski
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

ShardingSphere

Sharding-Sphere is an ecosystem of transparent distributed database middleware, focusing on data sharding, distributed transaction and database orchestration.

ShardingSphere has been incubating since 2018-11-10.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Clear Brand issues with other ecosystem projects.
2. Further ASF culture and processes.
3. Make more apache releases.

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

1. Have two Apache releases already. There are 4.0.0-RC1 and 4.0.0-RC2. All licenses and checklist are fine.

2. There are other several related project on GitHub org in ShardingSphere ecosystem, before or during project joined the ASF incubator, such as extension modules, UI, benchmark and acceptance test, they were using ShardingSphere-* prefix in project name, which may cause brand issue. We are trying to fix these. All ShardingSphere-* have been renamed to OpenSharding-*, and all old releases with ShardingSphere- are declared for not apache release. We have already transfer benchmark and UI project to apache repo and plan to merge extension modules and acceptance test into Apache repo.

3. Another brand related issue is ShardingSphere in DockerHub, including some binary releases, which have been moved apache release versions to ASF Infra

   • https://hub.docker.com/r/apache/sharding-proxy

   All of these are only including the approved releases.

   Right now, the brand issues are under control, so we think board or IPMC may do not need do any actions for now.

How has the community developed since the last report?

1. Yanan Zhao, Haisheng Sun, Guangyuan Wang and Qi Wang have been voted and joined as committer.
2. There are 74 people to contribute codes to the main repo, it increase pretty quickly. More and more people starting to provide pull requests for new features, minor enhancement, bug fix, example, documentation and answer questions. We are happy to see the community are growing up.
3. Over 100 companies have confirmed they are using ShardingSphere through issue report, our powered-by page Some companies has already provided some patches to feedback the community.

How has the project developed since the last report?

1. Release 4.0.0-RC2 last month, main feature is data encryption.
2. Setup benchmark report which can generate data every day to show performance status of ShardingSphere's changes.
3. Manage contributions for squash merge pull requests, forbidden push dev branch directly and setup code review procedure.
4. Merge donated Sharding-UI project to dev branch and planning to release it at 4.0.0-RC3.
5. Process donated auto scale up tool from community, processing dependencies and licenses now.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

2019-08-24

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

2019-09-23

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Are things falling through the cracks? If so, please list any open issues that need to be addressed.

Mentors are responsive and helpful. Things tend to be on the right way.

Signed-off-by:

•  (shardingsphere) Craig L Russell Comments:
•  (shardingsphere) Benjamin Hindman Comments:
•  (shardingsphere) Willem Ning Jiang Comments:
•  (shardingsphere) Von Gosling

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Hudi

Hudi provides atomic upserts and incremental data streams on Big Data

Hudi has been incubating since 2019-01-17.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Making sufficient number of releases in the Apache way
2. Growing community further by grooming contributors to committers

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

None

How has the community developed since the last report?

1. ~400 conversations on dev ML across ~50 topics
2. 20-30 participants for each one month period
3. ~40 support issues opened on GitHub

How has the project developed since the last report?

1. ~1500 gitbox activities over the three months
2. 122 JIRA issues created, 77 resolved
3. Community voted on two release candidates so far. RC3 underway towards first release
4. ApacheCon NA talk was well received at the conference
5. Hudi also featured in few industry blogs as an interesting project in the category.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

N/A

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

During inception into incubator

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Are things falling through the cracks? If so, please list any open issues that need to be addressed.

Yes. Very helpful!

Signed-off-by:

•  (hudi) Thomas Weise
  Comments:
•  (hudi) Luciano Resende
  Comments:
•  (hudi) Kishore Gopalakrishnan
  Comments:
•  (hudi) Suneel Marthi
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Livy

Livy is a service for managing long running Apache Spark contexts in your cluster. It exposes both a REST interface and a JDBC server. With Livy, new applications can be built on top of Apache Spark that require fine grained interaction with many Spark contexts.

Livy has been incubating since 2017-06-05.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Grow the community to get more reviews and content. However, at this point, the community might want to consider that it is a stable project that has met its initial functional goals. With multiple public releases under its belt, it might be worth discussing a time to graduate. A substantial increase in community activity in terms of code contribution and related community growth might occur after a new set of functionality/scope is identified for the project. But to date, the existing community and code are following the Apache way.

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

None

How has the community developed since the last report?

Moderate activity on mailing lists and code

How has the project developed since the last report?

Working on feature development and bug fix, planning to have a 0.7.0 release this year.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

2019-04-01

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

2019-01-22

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Yes. Are things falling through the cracks? If so, please list any open issues that need to be addressed.

Signed-off-by:

•  (livy) Bikas Saha
  Comments:
•  (livy) Brock Noland
  Comments:
•  (livy) Luciano Resende
  Comments:
•  (livy) Jean-Baptiste Onofre
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

MesaTEE

MesaTEE is a framework for universal secure computing

MesaTEE has been incubating since 2019-08-20.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

How has the community developed since the last report?

How has the project developed since the last report?

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

XXXX-XX-XX

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Are things falling through the cracks? If so, please list any open issues that need to be addressed.

Signed-off-by:

•  (mesatee) Felix Cheung
  Comments:
•  (mesatee) Furkan Kamaci
  Comments:
•  (mesatee) Jianyong Dai
  Comments:
•  (mesatee) Luciano Resende
  Comments:
•  (mesatee) Matt Sicker
  Comments:
•  (mesatee) Zhijie Shen
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Milagro

Milagro is core security infrastructure and crypto libraries for decentralized networks and distributed systems.

Milagro has been incubating since 2015-12-21.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Continue to build relevant and useful crypto libs and applications for decentralized networks in order to grow the ecosystem of users and contributors to the project.
2. Continue to improve compliance with the Apache Way
3. Further releases to both extend the capability of the crypto libraries and D-TA, and to demonstrate improved compliance with the Apache Way

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

Please see the comment re: mentors below.

How has the community developed since the last report?

No new members.

How has the project developed since the last report?

Milagro’s first ASF release, the crypto-c and crypto-js libraries, was successful. These are modern cryptographic libraries that focus on Elliptic Curve Cryptography. The libraries include support for pairing-based cryptography such as BLS for short signatures and MPIN for multi-factor authentication.

Issue tracking for individual repos has now been implemented in GitHub (Jira may still to be used for high-level planning) and redundant GitHub repos have been archived.

Decentralized Trust Authority (D-TA) server code has been donated by a team lead by Howard Kitto at Qredo & IP clearance forms completed. Milagro’s vision is for the D-TA to be a general-purpose key generation, distribution and storage server with an initial focus on a) generating type-3 pairing/identity-based secrets for MPIN zero-knowledge & multi-factor authentication clients and servers, and, b) safeguard shares of secrets such as Bitcoin private keys.

An attempt to release early alpha version of the D-TA failed the Apache Way but efforts to correct this are underway and we hope to have a successful ASF release shortly followed in quick succession by enhanced versions ultimately leading to a production-ready version early next year.

Website (http://milagro.apache.org/users.html) updated with crypto-c, crypto-js and D-TA documentation

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

2019-08-27

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

June 2019

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Our mentors haven’t been able to commit as much time to the project as they or us would like, but progress is still being made.

Signed-off-by:

•  (milagro) Nick Kew
  Comments:
•  (milagro) Jean-Frederic Clere
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

MXNet

A Flexible and Efficient Library for Deep Learning

MXNet has been incubating since 2017-01-23.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Revisit Apache Maturity Model Assessment — ONGOING.
2. Address past release issues. Successfully and smoothly make releases - ONGOING.

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

1. Our community is planning for the long-term development of MXNet. RFC: https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/issues/16167 Discussion: https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/issues/9686
2. Our community established the process for conflict resolution and violation reporting. https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

How has the community developed since the last report?

• The number of GitHub contributors increased to currently 735 (2019-06-24; +4.0% since last report)

• Active discussions on user forums

  • https://discuss.mxnet.io/ (English, 2.1K registered users (+17%) and 9.4K posts (+23%))
  • https://discuss.gluon.ai/ (Chinese, 7.7K registered users (+18%) and 21.1K posts(+10% since last report))

• Active blogs and social media presence

  • Medium (https://medium.com/apache-mxnet) w/ 1.6k followers (+14%)
  • Twitter account (https://twitter.com/ApacheMXNet) w/ 2.3k followers (+8.7%)
  • Meetup group (https://www.meetup.com/pro/deep-learning-with-apache-mxnet/) w/ 10 groups in 8 countries, 2182 members
  • (in China) Zhihu w/ 7.9k followers (+4.0%), WeChat official account w/ 4.6k followers. (+9.5% since last report)

• Active video channels

  • YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/apachemxnet) w/ 841 subscriber (+18.6% since last report)
  • Chinese YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjeLwTKPMlDt2segkZzw2ZQ) w/ 5.0k subscribers (+13.6%)
  • (in China) bilibili space (https://space.bilibili.com/209599371) w/ 18k subscriber (+20% since last report)

• Highlights in MXNet ecosystem

  • MXNet Gluon book published (https://zh.d2l.ai/) first 34k hard copies
  • Dive into Deep Learning has 59K 28-day active users, and has attracted 15K stars & 210+ contributors on GitHub. It has been adopted as a textbook or reference book by 30+ universities in U.S., China, Spain, Brazil, India, and Australia, such as MIT, UC Berkeley, CMU, IIT Bombay, PKU, and SJTU.
  • GluonCV v0.5.0 release (https://github.com/dmlc/gluon-cv/releases/tag/v0.5.0)
  • GluonNLP v0.8.1 release (https://github.com/dmlc/gluon-nlp/releases/tag/v0.8.1)
  • GluonTS v0.3.3 release (https://github.com/awslabs/gluon-ts/releases/tag/v0.3.3)
  • MXNet Model Server v1.0.7 release (https://github.com/awslabs/mxnet-model-server/releases/tag/v1.0.7)
  • GluonFace (https://github.com/THUFutureLab/gluon-face)
  • DeepInsight (https://github.com/deepinsight/insightface)

How has the project developed since the last report?

1. 1.5.0 release and 1.5.1 patch release: https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/releases/tag/1.5.0 https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/releases/tag/1.5.1 with over 830+ patches of new features, improvements, and fixes.
2. 2.0 Roadmap RFC published: https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/9d344832757860c0ec897cb79b84f4d552c6c37e52ae33f2c92b50f7@%3Cdev.mxnet.apache.org%3E
3. Many ongoing projects:
   • numpy-compatbile deep learning: https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/projects/14;
   • New Website Launch: https://mxnet.apache.org/ https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/projects/17
4. Github statistics of last month:

• Aug 30, 2019 – Sept 30, 2019: Excluding merges, 54 authors have pushed 128 commits to master and 164 commits to all branches. On master, 1038 files have changed and there have been 55,926 additions and 32,705 deletions.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

2019-10-01

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

2019-10-01

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Are things falling through the cracks? If so, please list any open issues that need to be addressed.

Yes, mentors have been responsive and helpful as usual

Signed-off-by:

•  (mxnet) Henri Yandell
  Comments:
•  (mxnet) Markus Weimer
  Comments:
•  (mxnet) Michael Wall
  Comments:
•  (mxnet) Bob Paulin
  Comments:
•  (mxnet) Jason Dai
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

TVM

TVM is a full stack open deep learning compiler stack for CPUs, GPUs, and specialized accelerators. It aims to close the gap between the productivity- focused deep learning frameworks, and the performance- or efficiency- oriented hardware backends.

TVM has been incubating since 2019-03-06.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Source code and website migration to ASF infra
2. Make the first Apache release
3. Continue to grow the community

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

No

How has the community developed since the last report?

TVM community has welcomed four committers since last report. We also made our first presentation at ApacheCon NA.

How has the project developed since the last report?

The project has been quite health, with ~120 pull requests being merged every months. These pull requests are authored by a diverse set of contributors(~50 authors last month).

Some highlights of recent developments:

• New integer analysis infrastructure
• Initial computation support
• Support for running quanitized models

For detailed information about the project development, please refer to the monthly TVM community's monthly summary:

• Oct: WIP
• Aug: https://discuss.tvm.ai/t/tvm-monthly-august-2019/3904
• July: https://discuss.tvm.ai/t/tvm-monthly-july-2019/3600
• June: https://discuss.tvm.ai/t/tvm-monthly-june-2019/3202

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

no release yet

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

Sep 30 2019

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Are things falling through the cracks? If so, please list any open issues that need to be addressed.

Mentors are very helpful in providing helpful guidance.

Signed-off-by:

•  (tvm) Byung-Gon Chun
  Comments: great progress
•  (tvm) Sebastian Schelter
  Comments:
•  (tvm) Henry Saputra
  Comments:
•  (tvm) Timothy Chen
  Comments:
•  (tvm) Furkan Kamaci
  Comments:
•  (tvm) Tianqi Chen
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Weex

Weex is a framework for building Mobile cross-platform high performance UI.

Weex has been incubating since 2016-11-30.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. • Problem: The binary convenience library of Weex should exclude the LGPL runtime(Webkit).
   • Solution: We will fix it by this PR
2. • Problem: A collection of Weex's tools should be donated to ASF, as they are essential part of building Weex App.
   • Solution: We'd like to make those tools doanted to ASF, and currently we're under IP clearance process.
3. • Problem: The Java pacakge should be renamed from com.taobao.weex to org.apache.weex.
   • Solution: Resolved by this PR.

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

No

How has the community developed since the last report?

• Learning Apache way and its value behind rules, then summaried a graduation check-list accoring to project maturity model.
• Spending time to resolve graduation issues, one of the is solved, others shall be fixed soon. And we're hoping graudate from Incubator before next poddling report (i.g. within 3 months).
• Weex join the ASOC(Alibaba summer of Code) from July to August, and one of the participant(post-graudate) was elected to committer after the program.

How has the project developed since the last report?

• We have 183 incoming pull request, and 150 of them are merged.
• We have 47 threads in Weex mailing list.
• We have solved 82 Github issues.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

2019-07-11

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

2019-08-27

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Yes, they are very helpful. I think we are good.

Signed-off-by:

•  (weex) Willem Ning Jiang
  Comments:
•  (weex) Myrle Krantz
  Comments:
•  (weex) Jan Piotrowski
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes: