Incubator PMC report for May 2021

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

There are presently 37 podlings incubating. In April, podlings executed 4 distinct releases. We added 5 new IPMC members, and none retired.

There was two IP clearance in April, and there was one new podling ShenYu, and another is under active discussion. No podlings graduated last month. This month we were missing reports from Livy, Pinot, and Weex. Livy has missed five reports in a row, a roll call was taken for Livy, and two PMC members responded. The IPMC will discuss retiring the project. A vote is in progress to retire Weex.

Currently, Sedona and Spot reports do not have signoff by mentors and will also be asked to report next month.

MXNet has new outstanding trademark and branding issues. In a review of a release of Doris, the IPMC found several serious trademark and branding issues. The PMC is working on them, but it looks like the current trademark owner wants to continue using the name, which means they're likely to confuse users and risk Doris graduating.

In a review of a Liminal release, a dependency on an LGPL library chardet was found. It turns out this is a common dependency and will impact several TLPs, including Apache Airflow. The community is working out the best way to get this dependency relicensed (which seems unlikely), replaced with something else or making it optional. Good progress has been made, working with 3rd parties.

An external project interviewed several IPMC members as part of a study to see what makes projects successful.

The Incubator track for ApacheCon is being organised.

Further cleanup was done in removing old releases from current podlings.
Still to sort out their releases areas are Crail, Livy, MXNet, Nemo and Pinot. Some old outstanding JIRAs were cleaned up, and there was a discussion on fixing up retired podling websites.

As usual, most discussions on the mailing list were around releases, new project proposals and selecting good names for podlings and finding new mentors.

Community

New IPMC members:

• Atri Sharma
• Jincheng Sun
• Lidong Dai
• Yu Li
• Zhenxu Ke

People who left the IPMC:

• None

New Podlings

• ShenYu

Podlings that failed to report, expected next month

• Livy
• Pinot
• Weex

Graduations

• None

The board has motions for the following:

• None

Releases

The following releases entered distribution during the month of April:

• Flagon Useralejs 2.1.1
• Hop 0.70
• Pinot 0.7.1
• Yunikorn 0.10.0

IP Clearance

• tika-helm
• Ballista

Legal / Trademarks

Note that legal policy has been clarified and made clear that:

• Jars containing compiled code cannot be include in source releases
• Category b code in any form cannot be include in source releases

Infrastructure

• None

Miscellaneous

• None

Table of Contents

Annotator
Doris
Heron
Milagro
NLPCraft
PageSpeed
SDAP
Sedona
Spot
Toree
Training
Tuweni

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:

1. Add active contributors
2. Stabilize a release cadence
3. Continue to demonstrate good governance

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

Community building has been very slow and it has been a long time since the project added new committers or PPMC members. After a period of relative inactivity and a conversion of the codebase to TypeScript, the project is long overdue for a second release. The IPMC should expect to see the project vote on a second release before the next board report to demonstrate forward momentum.

How has the community developed since the last report?

There have been some one-off contributions to project documentation and questions raised by people evaluating the project for use, but there have not been sustained contributions or involvement from new folks yet.

How has the project developed since the last report?

The project is now making continuous development packages to make it easier for developers to test upcoming releases. There is now tooling in place for generating API documentation, with plans to integrate the generated documentation into the website. The existing interfaces have all been documented. These efforts are all focused around the current goal of building community by making it easier for developers to become familiar with the project.

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:

2020-07-11

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

2018-09-04

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Yes. Mentors have been as available when needed, but the project will reach out to get advice on what else could be done to make the project more accessible to new contributors and to grow the community.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

There are no branding issues that the PPM is aware of.

Signed-off-by:

•  (annotator) Nick Kew
  Comments:
•  (annotator) Tommaso Teofili
  Comments:
•  (annotator) Benjamin Young
  Comments: Apologies for the lack of sign-off last month!

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Doris

Doris is a MPP-based interactive SQL data warehousing for reporting and analysis.

Doris has been incubating since 2018-07-18.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. More releases and rich product features.
2. Attract more users and contributors to make the community more prosperous.
3. There are some branding issues need to be addressed

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

There are some branding issues need to be addressed, which has been discussed in [1] And we are working on it.

[1] https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/rf51fad9228bf38f9fdf8ee0f691550e69853c7 b1a31a8d23381a52ce%40%3Cprivate.doris.apache.org%3E

How has the community developed since the last report?

Since the last report, we have added 8 contributors. There are currently 156 contributors and 21 committers. We have also conducted some online and offline meetup with the main developers of the community, and designated a Doris roadmap for 2021.

How has the project developed since the last report?

1. We are still working on releasing Doris 0.14, but we met some NOTICE file problems. The new release vote will be issued soon.

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:

2021-01-22

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

1. We are voting to invite a Committer(Zhengguo Yang) to join PPMC[1].

[1] https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/ra594f03122283ce963de5bc57b372152ea607e 58e156b9418cb114e9%40%3Cprivate.doris.apache.org%3E

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

All mentors are helpful, especially on the issue of branding, they helped us a lot.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

Yes, we have encountered some problems, but they are being resolved. These problems include unreasonable use of domain names, product names, and the migration of official docker images.

Signed-off-by:

•  (doris) Willem Ning Jiang
  Comments: We need to updated the latest status of the branding issue.
•  (doris) Shao Feng Shi
  Comments:
•  (doris) Ming Wen
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Heron

A real-time, distributed, fault-tolerant stream processing engine.

Heron has been incubating since 2017-06-23.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Building the community
2. Making releases
3. Make Heron easier to adopt

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

N/A

How has the community developed since the last report?

The community has remained consistent. New presentations in the monthly meetups. Increasing the community should be one of the major goals for the project.

How has the project developed since the last report?

• Bug/issue fixes
• Feature and documentation improvements
• Tried to Build the first convenience docker image

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:

2021-1-14: 0.20.3-incubating

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

The last two new committers voted in: Oliver Bristow (July 22, 2020) Windham Wong (July 3, 2020)

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Mentors have been helpful for the new release and answering questions.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

Yes

Signed-off-by:

•  (heron) Jake Farrell
  Comments:
•  (heron) Julien Le Dem
  Comments:
•  (heron) P. Taylor Goetz
  Comments:
•  (heron) Dave Fisher
  Comments:
•  (heron) Ming Wen
  Comments:
•  (heron) Kevin Ratnasekera
  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 libraries 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. In particular to update the Milagro website and other project sites (e.g. Whimsy) in accordance with Apache policies.
3. Further releases to increase the scope of the Milagro project, extend the capability of existing releases and to demonstrate improved compliance with the Apache Way.

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

No significant issues, however some administrative tasks around the project are still outstanding largely due to the pandemic but are now being addressed. In particular, a PPMC meeting to discuss the project roadmap needs to be arranged, old releases need to be deleted, confirmation that the project's Whimsy, Clutch, SVN, Confluence & Committers pages are all current, and the code signing keys needs countersigning.

How has the community developed since the last report?

No change.

How has the project developed since the last report?

Works is progressing preparing the MPC library for its first official Apache release.

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:

2020-02-10

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

February 2020

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

No issues

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

No known issues, but further investigation is still required by the Milagro community.

Signed-off-by:

•  (Milagro) Nick Kew
  Comments: There appears to be a cut and paste error. Will raise the subject on list.
•  (Milagro) Jean-Frederic Clere
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Justin Mclean: Can you please remove your old releases from the list release area.

NLPCraft

Apache NLPCraft is an open source library for adding natural language Interface to modern applications. Apache NLPCraft has been incubating since 2020-02-13.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Community growth & outreach.
2. Get to the point with multiple release managers.
3. Presenting the project at ApacheCon/ApacheAsia 2021.

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

Project have several new contributors that we are expecting to formally join the project/ASF in the future. These are individuals outside of the original NLPCraft community. We are also getting number of offline contributions when it comes to ideas, documentation and website. We are working on promoting these contributions and inviting these individuals to be more active. We need, however, to get much better at the general project outreach via meetups, conferences, etc. Some of the conversations happen on Gitter.

Project has 8 forks on the Github.

How has the community developed since the last report?

Project produced 2 releases. Both releases were an interim, bug fix releases. So far, they were produced by the same release manager (Aaron Radzinski). The community is working on the major release 0.7.5 right now that should go GA in the April 2021 with significant changes and improvements (all of which are reflected in JIRA tickets for 0.7.5 version). At this point, the community does not have a formalized roadmap with many internal discussions happening on Slack channels. We are generally expecting to formalize the long-term roadmap towards 1.0.0 release with hopefully a larger community around the project.

Community is actively working on 0.7.5 release that should be sent for a vote in the coming days.

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:

NLPCraft 0.7.4 released on Jan 31, 2021.

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

Aug, 2020 - Gleb Zernov (ifropc), committer.

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

We have had some problems with getting attention from mentors - however this has been largely resolved as of now. We've also identified some of the communication inefficiencies that would help us to engage mentors better going forward.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

Yes, no issues to report.

Signed-off-by:

•  (nlpcraft) Roman Shaposhnik
  Comments:
•  (nlpcraft) Furkan Kamaci
  Comments:
•  (nlpcraft) Evans Ye
  Comments:
•  (nlpcraft) Paul King
  Comments:
•  (nlpcraft) Konstantin I Boudnik
  Comments:
•  (nlpcraft) Dave Fisher
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Justin Mclean: Can you please remove your old releases from the list release area.

PageSpeed

PageSpeed represents a series of open source technologies to help make the web faster by rewriting web pages to reduce latency and bandwidth.

PageSpeed has been incubating since 2017-09-30.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Grow the number of active developers
2. Enhance the release process: switch to github tagged release to simplify.

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

While there is a healthy user base, the number of active developers remains persistently low. This seems to be a hard to address challenge.

How has the community developed since the last report?

Mailing lists and git issues are active. The number of active developers is unchanged.

How has the project developed since the last report?

Minor activity, updating deps on the 2.0-alpha.

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:

We'll be blogging about the 2.0 Envoy PoC, hopefully that will get some developer interest as we pivot into the service mesh world

Date of last release:

The week of May 11th, 2020

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

May 27 2019 (Longinos Ferrando, elected as both committer and PMC member)

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Yes.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

As far as we know the brand is respected by third parties.

Signed-off-by:

•  (pagespeed) Jukka Zitting
  Comments:
•  (pagespeed) Leif Hedstrom
  Comments:
•  (pagespeed) Nick Kew
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

SDAP

SDAP is an integrated data analytic center for Big Science problems.

SDAP has been incubating since 2017-10-22.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Make official SDAP (Incubating) Release
2. Improve committer participation
3. Improve/create user guide documentation

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?

New Committers and PPMC members elected

How has the project developed since the last report?

Completed:

• Migrated SDAP to Python 3.

New efforts and features:

• Working on Elasticsearch integration.
• Adding Apache Parquet support for in situ data
• Integration with AWS Athena
• Enhancements to support multispectral data

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?

Two new committers were elected in March 2021.

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.

Have not heard from Jörn in a while.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

Are 3rd parties respecting and correctly using the podlings name and brand? If not what actions has the PPMC taken to correct this? Has the VP, Brand approved the project name?

Not aware of any issues

Signed-off-by:

•  (sdap) Jörn Rottmann
  Comments:
•  (sdap) Trevor Grant
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Sedona

Sedona is a big geospatial data processing engine. It provides an easy to use APIs for spatial data scientists to manage, wrangle, and process geospatial data.

Sedona has been incubating since 2020-07-19.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Need several release managers.
2. Currently, Jia is the release manager Complete IP clearance is not done yet.
3. Website may not be fully compliant with Apache guidelines

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

N/A

How has the community developed since the last report?

All good here. We are interacting with our users through dev@s.a.o and Gitter

How has the project developed since the last report?

1. We published our first release Sedona 1.0.0.
2. We added several patches after the first release according to the community feedback

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

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

Date of last release:

2021-02-06

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.

All good here

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

Are 3rd parties respecting and correctly using the podlings name and brand? If not what actions has the PPMC taken to correct this? Has the VP, Brand approved the project name?

All good here

Signed-off-by:

•  (sedona) Felix Cheung
  Comments:
•  (sedona) Jean-Baptiste Onofré
  Comments:
•  (sedona) George Percivall
  Comments:
•  (sedona) Von Gosling
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Spot

Apache Spot is a platform for network telemetry built on an open data model and Apache Hadoop.

Spot has been incubating since 2016-09-23.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Revive community activity (Discussion in mailing lists, increase frequency of commits)
2. Create a new roadmap and release plan that will improve adoption
3. Make it easier to contribute to the project (e.g. documentation, framework).

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

Not at this time

How has the community developed since the last report?

We're continuing to solidify a short term and long term on a roadmap with the community that will allow more contributors to focus and work on different levels of the project (i.e. data modeling and schema design, use-cases, ingestion, ml, ui, dev ops, docs, etc). These discussions have been delayed this quarter due to COVID and getting schedules aligned relative to other workloads.

How has the project developed since the last report?

The master branch of Apache Spot was largely developed on commercial
but freely available Hadoop software (i.e. Cloudera, Hortonworks) that now have been either End of Life’d (or will be in 2022) in favor of the newer Cloudera Data Platform (CDP), or have been put behind a paywall to get updates. The cloud provider landscape has also changed drastically in the last few years and it's time that we start looking at better support for Quickstart options in each major cloud providers so we can further develop the project for the community with wider platform support, and give committers better options for creating development environments to more efficiently contribute to the project.

The following topics are planned for the next set of discussions with the community to determine what we focus on for the next several quarters:

• Add more native support on cloud infrastructure and software (i.e. AWS, Azure, GCP)
  • In the short-term we can focus on AWS EMR on standing up Spot and fixing any issues related to getting the software installed and working.
  • In the long term we will want to support several cloud providers and on-premise options depending on the interest of the community.
• Add an infrastructure module to Spot to automate creating clusters in each providers we plan to support.
  • Initially we can focus on Cloudformation support with AWS EMR.
  • Our goal will be to generalize further in the long term with Terraform across each provider.
• Investigate and explore alternative replacement for Spot UI (i.e. Apache Supersets)
  • In the short-term Apache Supersets may give us a basic authentication and visualization layer into the data landed and processed by Spot.
  • In the long-term we will need to develop a more comprehensive security and use-case roadmap for the UI and determine if it makes sense to develop something from scratch.

The next step will be to create Jira Epic’s and tasks for these items so we can start to distribute the work across the community.

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:

2017-09-08

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

2019-09-02

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 our mentors have been helpful. We will be engaging them more soon for guidance on on-boarding new committers, as well as a few other items related to the Whimsy and Clutch reports and also updating the Apache Spot Podling website as this is missing a number of updates.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

Are 3rd parties respecting and correctly using the podlings name and brand? If not what actions has the PPMC taken to correct this? Has the VP, Brand approved the project name?

Yes.

Signed-off-by:

•  (spot) Uma Maheswara Rao G
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Toree

Toree provides applications with a mechanism to interactively and remotely access Apache Spark.

Toree has been incubating since 2015-12-02.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1.Increase active contributors

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?

It has been a quiet few months, with a few bug reported related to Apache Spark 3.x. The community also needs to update the latest RC to conform to the changes on release requirements for python packages.

How has the project developed since the last report?

Quiet few months with work needed to be done on the failed RC.

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:

2020-07-31

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

Kevin Bates was added to the PPMC on 2019-08-14

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.

There was nothing requiring mentor intervention on the last quarter.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

Are 3rd parties respecting and correctly using the podlings name and brand? If not what actions has the PPMC taken to correct this? Has the VP, Brand approved the project name?

No Trademark issues

Signed-off-by:

•  (toree) Luciano Resende
  Comments: In case people ask about the contents of the report, the podling has reported last month, and not much changed since then.
•  (toree) Julien Le Dem
  Comments:
•  (toree) Ryan Blue
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Training

The Training project aims to develop resources which can be used for training purposes in various media formats, languages and for various Apache and non-Apache target projects.

Training has been incubating since 2019-02-21.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Improve the participation from community for Apache Training Project
2. Create a tutorial on how the tools provided by this project can be used to create own content
3. Review current policies around contribution review and releases to find a pragmatic compromise

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

The Training Project needs more contribution from other Apache Projects. It also needs feedback from other Apache Projects on the presentations and trainings developed till now.

How has the community developed since the last report?

Activity has remained low since the last report. There were 8 posts in last 3 months. We have to work on strategies to increase the queries for contributions from individual contributors.

How has the project developed since the last report?

New training slides were added on following topics:

• Apache Airflow

PR activity is less since the last report.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

There are currently some issues with this podling that we are working to address, we believe that the issues are not yet critical and can be turned around from within the community but want to make the board aware of this early on.

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

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

November 2020

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Mentors have been responsive and helpful when reached out to.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

The name search process has not yet been started, as there is still time to do that if and when graduation draws nearer. The PPMC is actively monitoring usage of the Podlings current name on other sites. The Podling is not directly affiliating with any sponsors donating content and presenting an independent image on the webpage.

Signed-off-by:

•  (training) Craig Russell
  Comments: We may need more outreach to PMCs to ask them to add material.
•  (training) Christofer Dutz
  Comments:
•  (training) Justin Mclean
  Comments:
•  (training) Lars Francke
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Tuweni

Tuweni is a set of libraries and other tools to aid development of blockchain and other decentralized software in Java and other JVM languages.

Tuweni has been incubating since 2019-03-25.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. More contributors!
2. Getting started, docs, videos
3. Finishing the Ethereum client

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?

Community is increasing in size a bit, just with a bit more interest. The dev list increased to 29 subscribers.

How has the project developed since the last report?

The project is under active development.

We have added crucial features to the project such as an Ethereum Virtual Machine, a proxy subprotocol and a network crawler.

We need to cut another release but keep pushing it back, too much work.

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:

2020-11-27

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

Nicolas Melendez as committer on 2021-04-29.

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.

All good, need a release out.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

Are 3rd parties respecting and correctly using the podlings name and brand? If not what actions has the PPMC taken to correct this? Has the VP, Brand approved the project name?

No problems reported.

Signed-off-by:

•  (tuweni) Jean-Baptiste Onofré
  Comments:
•  (tuweni) Furkan Kamaci
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes: