Can we try to get some data on what amount of effort is required here? Andrew, Ignasi, here are some questions for you.
If we want to at least keep Jclouds going, without necessarily doing much fresh feature development on it: 1. What do you think is a desirable *minimum* number of active contributors to the project (doing releases, dependency updates, security fixes, occasional important bug fixes)? 2. How much work is that likely to involve? (Approx time commitment). Let's separate out how much effort it is to build, test and publish a release from other stuff which is going to be more ad-hoc. 3. How much access to cloud providers/infrastructure is required to test a release? How expensive is it? 4. How much work would it be for new contributors to learn the codebase well enough to contribute effectively? I ask (1) because I think we need to focus on how many new people we need to get involved. It seems that the current number of active contributors is approximately 1, Andrew, with some time perhaps from Ignasi and others? I ask (2) because I think any of us will want to know what we would need to do if we volunteer to become an active contributor. (I'm sure I'm not the only one who doesn't feel they have a lot of spare time.) I ask (3) because any of us may be in the same boat as me - I wouldn't be allowed to do any jclouds work using my employer's cloud provider accounts or infrastructure, so I would have to use personal accounts. The only ones I have personally are AWS and GCP. Would any of us need a wide range of provider accounts to test a release? How much would the testing cost? I would be reluctant to run a test suite I didn't know on a personal account. I'm sure we've all heard stories about nightmare AWS bills... Finally (4) gives us an idea of the ramp-up involved. I think we can assume that we're all fairly experienced Java devs, or we wouldn't be reading this. But say we've never looked into the code yet. Would you or others have any time to help bring us up to speed? I did a bit of work on jclouds back around 2016 and the way I remember it is that it took a week or two to get my head around the bits I needed to know, but it was reasonably straightforward, the code wasn't very convoluted. I had to take the time to learn about Guava/Guice. But back then I was able to work on it in the day job, and had great help learning it from Andrea Turli; thanks Andrea ;-) I think if we know better how much it will take, we can each more easily ask ourselves, "could I do this"? If enough of us say "yes", we may avoid the attic yet. Geoff On Sat, 10 Dec 2022 at 22:28, Enrico Olivelli <eolive...@gmail.com> wrote: > Il Sab 10 Dic 2022, 12:47 Jean-Baptiste Onofré <j...@nanthrax.net> ha > scritto: > > > Ok. Fair enough. > > > > Imho Karaf-jclouds is probably different as the number of users is very > > very thin. > > > > But I understand your points. > > > > I will support of moving to attic anyway. Just wanted to give a chance > for > > the community to speak up. > > > > The users will find alternatives (maybe forking part of jclouds). > > > > I think that forking jclouds is not a good solution, as you lose all the > potential interactions with other users, for instance in case of security > issues (cannot inform all the users, share patches in a coodinated way). > > I understand the points of the people in this thread that are skeptical > about adding external people. Probably I would feel the same way. > > I believe that it is up to the jcloud PMC to decide on the destiny of the > project and as JB is saying, users will find their solutions. > > My 2 cents > > Enrico > > > > > Thanks > > Regards > > JB > > > > Le sam. 10 déc. 2022 à 11:34, Ignasi Barrera <n...@apache.org> a écrit : > > > > > Even if it is maintenance, now it's not time for just good intentions > > > (which are very much appreciated), but time for action, and action is > not > > > there and my confidence in it happening any time soon is very low. > > > > > > Let me give you a concrete example: > > > > > > * In 2019, we voted on moving jcloud-karaf under the Apache Karaf > project > > > [1] because we were not able to maintain the project properly. > > > * The last commit in the transferred project [2] is from 2019 (3 years > > > back). > > > * That project is still in jclouds 2.2.0, whilst jclouds is in 2.6.0; > > it's > > > still 4 releases behind. > > > > > > There have been no feature additions, but over 3 years there haven't > > > even been maintenance tasks done at all, even just to keep the project > up > > > to date with upstream jclouds. > > > > > > Although I appreciate all the good intentions of people volunteering, I > > > don't see any action here (as Gaul also requested), and honestly, I > think > > > repeating the jcloud-karaf story will not do any favor to users. If we > > > change the PMC and inactivity continues, jclouds will be even in a > worse > > > position than it is today: it will keep having an inactive PMC, but > > > composed of people that are even less familiar/expert in its codebase. > > > > > > IMO, if we really care about users, we should see something here beyond > > the > > > much-appreciated good intentions, because we've tried this route in the > > > past and it has not worked. > > > > > > > > > [1] https://lists.apache.org/thread/30770j9jwcn14vzczzkbhz37g8q2olc6 > > > [2] https://github.com/apache/karaf-jclouds > > > > > > > > > > > > On Sat, Dec 10, 2022 at 6:58 AM Jean-Baptiste Onofré <j...@nanthrax.net> > > > wrote: > > > > > > > That's a fair comment. As we are mostly talking about "maintenance", > I > > > > don't wait for any new big features in the short term. > > > > As said, the main concern for these guys is about jclouds as an > > > > important dependency in their project. > > > > > > > > I can't speak on their behalf, but I assume Pulsar and Brooklyng guys > > > > (at least) want to maintain jclouds alive as dependency. > > > > > > > > Personally, I prefer to find other approaches (and it's what we do in > > > > Apache Sunny and Apache Karaf). > > > > > > > > Regards > > > > JB > > > > > > > > On Fri, Dec 9, 2022 at 6:55 PM Ignasi Barrera < > > ignasi.barr...@gmail.com> > > > > wrote: > > > > > > > > > > It's not about me, it's about people volunteering actually stepping > > up > > > > > and starting to take action, and that is not happening. > > > > > > > > > > You say: 'After some months, we will definitely see if the project > is > > > > still > > > > > alive or not." > > > > > It's been 2 months now. In your opinion, how many more months of > > > inaction > > > > > should we wait, and what's the reasoning behind that number? > > > > > > > > > > On Fri, Dec 9, 2022 at 6:01 PM Jean-Baptiste Onofré < > j...@nanthrax.net > > > > > > > wrote: > > > > > > > > > > > If you don't want to continue on jclouds (I fully understand > this), > > > > > > fair enough. But if people still want to maintain it, I don't see > > any > > > > > > issue there. > > > > > > > > > > > > Is a fork better ? I don't think so. Because, it might happen if > we > > > > > > retire the project. > > > > > > > > > > > > As I proposed earlier, if the current PMC members don't want to > > > > > > continue on jclouds, but we have potential volunteers to take > > over, I > > > > > > think it's fair to try. Apache is community driven, if we have > new > > > > > > people in the jclouds community, willing to help, we could be > > > > > > "welcoming". > > > > > > After some months, we will definitely see if the project is still > > > > alive or > > > > > > not. > > > > > > > > > > > > If you absolutely want to retire the project, I'm with you, and > > then > > > > > > pulsar or brooklyn (or another project) will do a fork probably. > > > > > > > > > > > > Regards > > > > > > JB > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > On Fri, Dec 9, 2022 at 3:38 PM Ignasi Barrera <n...@apache.org> > > > wrote: > > > > > > > > > > > > > > I agree with Gaul's comments. > > > > > > > > > > > > > > If people wants to help, worth to see if it actually happens ;) > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > It's been 2 months since the proposal of retiring the project > and > > > to > > > > > > date, > > > > > > > nothing real happened beyond "I'm in" comments. > > > > > > > If at the time of discussing the project retirement, this is > all > > > the > > > > > > energy > > > > > > > that is around to maintain it, I don't think it is a setup for > > > > success > > > > > > and > > > > > > > agree with Gaul that we will better serve users by retiring the > > > > project. > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > P.S. Geoff, really appreciate your honesty in accounting for > your > > > > > > bandwidth! > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > >
