Hi, Sorry to have been quiet, I'm "half off" for festive time ;)
I'm still interested in helping maintain jclouds from a community standpoint. However, clearly, the current committers/PMC members don't want to be involved anymore. As most of the volunteers are not jclouds PMC members (I think I'm the only one), you have to accept the decision from PMC members. So, I see only three options for the projects using jclouds: 1. current PMC members accept to extend/expand the committer list (and PMC) to have new people volunteer to maintain jclouds, so projects can still use jclouds. I don't want to be pushy in this direction. It's important to have the long time PMC members, if they want to move jclouds in the attic, it's fair and we have to accept that. 2. replace jclouds with something else. That's probably the preferred approach, replacing jclouds directly with cloud providers APIs. 3. fork jclouds (or part of jclouds) in other projects (the part actually used in the project). For instance, we can imagine having code from jclouds moved/forked in brooklyn. My prefered option is probably 2, according to the discussion in this thread. Happy new year to all, Regards JB On Wed, Dec 28, 2022 at 9:11 PM Geoff Macartney <geom...@apache.org> wrote: > > Hi all, > > Hope you had a restful Christmas break. > > Andrew, thanks very much for these details, that is helpful to scope the > effort required to maintain jclouds. Of course what takes 10 hours for > Andrew, with his familiarity with jclouds, will take perhaps significantly > longer for those of us who are not yet familiar, even after an initial > period of learning. You'll each have your own estimations I'm sure. > > So - two questions to everyone who has expressed an interest in this > discussion (have I missed anyone?): > > Alex, Andrey, Enrico, Francois, JB, Juan, Iuliana, and anyone else for that > matter who hasn't yet spoken up. > > 1. Who among us feels strongly enough about their need for jclouds to > continue business as usual that they want to volunteer to commit to the > time it will take to learn it and then maintain it going forward (becoming > a committer)? This would not only include releases, as Andrew outlined, but > also security fixes, and maintenance as dependencies age (e.g. that gson > problem). It seems to me we need *at least* two volunteers for jclouds to > continue; three would be better. > > 2. Or do you agree with Andrew that avoiding the attic doesn't need to be > the goal? That everything has a natural lifetime and maybe the attic is now > the right course for jclouds? Perhaps you feel your effort would be better > directed toward adapting your own code to a world without jclouds. E.g. > from a Brooklyn point of view maybe the time is near for replacing > JCloudLocation with provider specific locations, or a new abstraction. Who > knows, that might even remove a slew of dependencies and assist us moving > on from Java 8. > > Concretely: if you want to volunteer to commit to maintaining jclouds, can > I ask you please to reply to this email to say so. > > Kind regards to all, and wishing you a Happy New Year. > > Geoff > > > > > On Sun, 25 Dec 2022 at 01:12, Andrew Gaul <g...@apache.org> wrote: > > > On Sun, Dec 11, 2022 at 03:25:04PM +0000, Geoff Macartney wrote: > > > 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)? > > > > Apache projects need a quorum of 3 committers to make a release which > > jclouds will soon lack. Mechanically, a single motivated person could > > keep pushing releases with a few drive-by +1s. But practically, the > > jclouds blobstore and compute scope is large enough that two people > > should maintain the project with some domain expertise. > > > > > 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. > > > > I estimate that I spend 10 hours per release: > > > > * triaging blobstore issues (~1 hour) > > * reviewing/pushing forward outstanding PRs (~2 hours) > > * running integration tests (~1 hour) > > * dealing with jclouds tech debt and breakages (0-10 hours?) > > * Apache process and overhead (~1 hour) > > * fixes that help my project or look easy (? hours) > > > > > 3. How much access to cloud providers/infrastructure is required to test > > a > > > release? How expensive is it? > > > > I have access to all the major blobstore providers and run integration > > tests for them. I estimate this costs me less than $1 but running > > compute tests may cost more. Note that there are flaky and broken tests > > which require some judgment call so I only look at the diff between > > releases. > > > > > 4. How much work would it be for new contributors to learn the codebase > > > well enough to contribute effectively? > > > > jclouds is a big project that uses a custom annotation mechanism > > (RestAnnotationProcessor) and extensively (excessively?) uses Guice > > which makes it hard for many people (including me!) to understand. We > > could debate the merits of the technical approach but socially this > > makes it hard to attract contributors. I also think that the technical > > debt that jclouds has accrued generally makes it less pleasant to work > > on than simpler or newer projects. I don't think this answers your > > question but Ignasi and I now work outside the Java and cloud ecosystems > > and are not in a good position to explain/rediscover how this all works. > > > > > 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. > > > > I don't know that avoiding the attic should be the goal. If there are > > motivated people that want to continue jclouds then please do so. But > > currently no one is doing any work towards this end. jclouds continues > > to accrue technical debt (e.g., gson 2.9.0 incompatibility) and there is > > no one left to do this work. > > > > I think it would be good for a new contributor to step back and compare > > against similar multi-cloud projects like libcloud to evaluate what > > jclouds does well and what it does not. I suspect that reimplementing > > the REST APIs is not a good choice in 2022 and instead jclouds or a > > similar library should reuse the vendor SDKs and focus only on > > multi-cloud portability. And simplify the project so users can become > > contributors more easily. > > > > -- > > Andrew Gaul > > http://gaul.org/ > >
