Jakarta Board Report
Status
This board report was mainly constructed by other people than me, which is a big improvement (thanks everyone). I also moved the board report to a fixed location on the wiki (http://wiki.apache.org/jakarta/JakartaBoardReport-current), so it's easier to locate for people. The code grant for the not yet commons SSL (formerly named commons-ssl), has been completed, so we can progress to having a vote where SSL should end up on general and based on that result take the correct incubator path (legal / full incubation).
What is not completely clear for me at this point, is the board report schedule. An extra report was requested (lack of commons projects in the report). Reporting next month again will be a lot of work, since my goal is to report on every subproject (even if there is no or hardly any activity).
Inactive projects
Disclaimer : we have lot's of active projects !
Definition list :
Inactive project = a project that has no *developer* community.
The Apache Way :
To become committer on a project you have to earn that right, you have to stand out, submit patches, show you care, learn the apache way and have to get noticed by the current committers who can nominate such a person.
Problem :
If that didn't happen enough in the past, it can happen that at a certain point no developer community is active anymore.
Which causes :
A catch22 situation. Since there is no developer community, no one is able to determine if people deserve to become a committer. Even if you are monitoring such a list (such as I do for all Jakarta lists), it is hard to determine if people deserve committership.
Solution :
The only thing we know for sure : inactive projects needs someone to mentor the project to become active again. This goes for all possible scenario's :
- Actively support forks and when they show they are capable to work on the project, get the code back (needs mentoring, grants, etc) 2. More liberal in getting committers on board 3. Actively following the user / dev lists and issue trackers to see if there is someone ready for committer ship. (is the normal way, although the focus here is not if patches etc are technically correct)
I like to prevent Jakarta becoming some kind of collection with inactive project, so the first goal is preventing that this scenario occurs on our current subprojects where possible. So I would like to ask the current active developers to invest a little bit more time in looking what others are doing.
I think this discussion is also useful to have on the incubator list.
Releases
- 13 February 2007 Commons Lang 2.3
- 13 February 2007 Commons IO 1.3.1
- 30 January 2007 Commons IO 1.3
- 30 December 2006 Commons Betwixt 0.8
- 30 December 2006 Commons VFS 1.0
- 19 December 2006 Commons SCXML 0.6
Community changes
New committers, pmc persons, asf members and departures.
PMC Members
- Yoav Shapira resigned from the PMC
The following new commiters were voted in:
- Yegor Kozlov (POI)
- Luc Maisonobe (Commons Math)
- Matt Benson (Commons JXPath)
Infrastructure news
Started to investigate the moderators we have and contacting all the moderators asking if they are still active. If there are gaps, I will try to fill the void by finding volunteers. This way we prevent that lists aren't moderated.
Subproject news
News related to various subprojects, if they have news. Volunteers for subproject news are desired, otherwise the Chair is responsible for finding out said news (and should mark that they had to do so). Sections with a prefix of MvdB are notes added by the chair
BCEL
MvdB :
Some user questions, further no action taken on the future of BCEL (on the list is contacting the 2 currently exising forks out there, to see if there is interenst in moving development back to Jakarta. Afaik Findbugs and AspectJ have forks.
BSF
MvdB :
They are currently planning for a 3.0 release and for jsr223 they are investigating to get the TCK. Geir is in the process of arranging things.
Cactus
MvdB :
Cactus development was stalled and recently Petar Tahchiev sent a mail to the list, saying he had continued development of cactus on https://mamouth.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/mamouth. I (=Martin van den Bemt) am currently in the process of informing Petar on what actions to take (eg Code Grants/CLA/CCLA) to move development back to the cactus project. When the paperwork is there, we will run the code base through the incubator (at a minimum legal).
Commons
Switching from Maven-1 to Maven-2 gets closer - we can now build the website from Maven-2. Next we need to look at how we would do a release under Maven-2 and whether it passes our requirements.
Key:
- Inactive - No activity, no one watching it. Candidate for dormancy.
- Maintenance - No activity, someone watching it.
There are thirty-two components in the Commons 'Proper', that is the released components.
Attributes
Inactive - however the last release had an issue so a new release ideally needs to be done.
BeanUtils
Maintenance. A 1.8.0 release is slowly being worked on. Struts were a major user, however they've moved on to using OGNL in their new version, so the drive for a BeanUtils release is much lower than it has been previously.
Betwixt
Just had a 0.8 release and currently actively maintained.
Chain
Maintenance. Used by a few projects (including Shale) and libraries, but not widespread. Limited in scope due to awkard support for conditional processing, so not likely to be aggressively enhanced.
CLI
Inactive. A 2.x version was close to release many years ago but then the interested committers stopped committing. The 1.x version had reached the end of its shelf-life, and though there are users of the 2.x version no one has shown interest in releasing it.
Codec
Maintenance. A few enhancements in JIRA, but nothing major to work on.
Collections
Maintenance. Some work started on a JDK 1.5 version in the sandbox a few months back.
Configuration
Active.
Daemon
Active.
DBCP
Active. A 1.2.2 release is coming soon.
DbUtils
Maintenance. A 1.1 release was made, and there really aren't that many interesting issues to work on for a 1.2 release.
Digester
Maintenance. There are no bugs in JIRA, and no significant enhancement requests; everyone seems content with the current release.
Discovery
Inactive. A 0.4 release was made, and nothing new is planned.
EL
Inactive. Its main use was in Tomcat, and it's not used in their latest Tomcat 6.
Activity has restarted here and there may be a 1.1 release if it continues.
FileUpload
Active. A 1.2 release is in the works now that IO 1.3 is released.
IO
Active. A 1.3 release has been made. Mostly this was a case of adding new functionality (some from the Sandbox Finder component) and fixing some bugs. There was a screwup (method wasn't static as desired) so a 1.3.1 has also been released. There's no activity on a 1.4 yet, but I'm sure there will be.
Jelly
Not much activity - still in widespread use due to Maven-1, but this is fading. Another notable user is JIRA who use it as their scripting language.
Jexl
Jexl gets a little bit of development here and there and has been reasonably stable recently. We keep threatening to start Jexl 2.
JXPath
Version 1.2 has been the "current" release of this library for over two years, which is testament to the overall stability of the code. There have been a number of issues closed since 1.2 was released, however, so a 1.3 release seems to be in the near future. After this it will probably be appropriate to categorize JXPath as being in maintenance mode: a new committer (Matt Benson) has stepped up to act as its curator.
Lang
Lang 2.3 has been released this month. Active development is expected to continue.
Launcher
Inactive (2 years since a notable commit). A user did recently ask if he could help, but it's likely this is destined for dormancy.
Logging
The Maven 2.x files for the 1.1 release were incorrect and a few bugs have been fixed so a 1.1.1 release needs to be made. No one has volunteered to be the release manager yet though.
Math
Active.
Modeler
Maintenance. Dims organized a release back in July, since then one issue has been fixed.
Net
Actively working on a 2.0 release.
Pool
Following a bugfix release, a rethink things a bit 2.0 release is in the medium term planning.
Primitives
Inactive.
SCXML
On 19th of December version 0.6 of Commons SCXML was released. This version included notable improvements towards processing of XML namespaces in SCXML documents, custom Commons SCXML actions for defining domain-specific vocabularies and Java serializability of the model and executor instances. Commons SCXML is now also used to drive an implementation of Shale dialogs (starting version 1.0.4 of the Shale framework).
Transaction
Some activity - slowly preparing for a 1.2 release.
Validator
Active.
VFS
VFS had its first release (version 1.0) at the end of 2006!
Dormant
There are thirty-eight unreleased components in here. Nothing has threatened to leave this status.
Sandbox
There are twelve components in here that are valid for dormancy (finder + i18n spring to mind). Nothing in the sandbox currently looks like it's close to moving to proper.
ECS
There was an email in 2006 (one thread all year) offering to start up ECS2, but nothing after that. Inactive and ready for dormancy.
HttpComponents
including Commons HttpClient
HttpClient 3.1 RC1 is being prepared. HttpCore-NIO 4.0 alpha has been selected as the new transport layer for Synapse. Work on HttpClient 4.0 alpha continues, but has been delayed as the focus is now on HttpCore-NIO.
JCS
MvdB :
JIRA notifications are send to the list now. Not much development happening currently.
JMeter
MvdB :
Active as always. The concern about the lack of committers for JMeter in my last report is weakened by the fact that other people are stil involved, although don't currently have any cycles to spare.
ORO
Apart from the occasional regexp question, the ORO is inactive and ready for dormancy.
POI
MvdB :
Added Mark Thomas to the POI Committer list. Actively working on a release, which is planned for the beginning of March. After that release next steps will be taken in a move to TLP. All headers, notices are up-to-date and the build process have been updated to accomodate a correct release.
Regexp
Apart from the occasional bug report, the Regexp is in deep maintenance.
Slide
MvdB :
Activity is picking up and a potential other committer candidate was introduced, which means more patches and more activity. I am also currently investigating if I can use Slide for my self, so who knows 
Taglibs
A 1.1.3 release of the Jakarta Standard Taglib is being worked on. The RDC taglig has activity - however apart from that all of the taglibs should be considered Inactive and available for dormancy.
Turbine
The development in the trunk is slowly being revived. Active work is done in some of the Fulcrum components (security).