I vote #2.

On Fri, Oct 07, 2022 at 12:19:10PM +0000, Roger Leigh wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> 
> It's been over three months since my original email on this subject.  There 
> is a related discussion about this on the Xerces-C++ mailing list just now, 
> and it would be useful to reach a conclusion on this for Xalan-C as well.
> 
> 
> I've updated the git statistics I did earlier in the year, which can be 
> viewed or downloaded here: [?xerces-xalan-git-monthly.xlsx icon]  
> xerces-xalan-git-monthly.xlsx<https://codelibreconsulting.sharepoint.com/:x:/s/Opensourcesoftware/EabAzxgzU3pCjUSKSVvWjZgBlUGZUb91q2PVMkGk1oaIHw?e=MVBvPA>.
>   There are no changes-there has not been a single commit to the source 
> repository since 2021.  There has not been any change to the maintenance 
> status of the project since my last email: there are no active maintainers, 
> no one has shown any interest in doing any maintenance, and none of the 
> previous maintainers who are still present actually use Xalan any longer-so 
> there is little prospect of previously active maintainers returning.  I 
> myself will be leaving the project once this question is answered 
> irrespective of the outcome-I no longer use Xalan-C, I have no time to commit 
> to it for future work and releases, I just want to see it retired gracefully 
> so that we don't leave anyone with the mistaken impression that this is a 
> project which is active and well supported when it is most certainly not.  
> This is not a library which new projects should be considering to use.
> 
> 
> 
> This is the commit history since 01 Oct 2012:
> 
> 
> $ git shortlog -s --oneline --all --since "01 OCT 2012"
>      1  Benjamin Beasley
>      1  Bill Blough
>      1  Biswapriyo Nath
>      1  Kvarec Lezki
>    182  Roger Leigh
>     29  Steven J. Hathaway
> 
> 
> 
> I would like for the PMC to vote on the future of the project.  Do we
> 
> 
> 
>   1.  Retire the project to the Attic
>   2.  Keep the project going
> 
> I'm not sure if I'm formally a PMC member or not, but realistically I'm the 
> only one who has done any work on the project for the past 8 years.  So if I 
> can vote on this I'll vote for (a).
> 
> 
> Kind regards,
> Roger
> 
> From: rle...@codelibre.net <rle...@codelibre.net>
> Sent: 22 June 2022 23:21
> To: d...@xalan.apache.org; c-users@xalan.apache.org
> Subject: Future of xalan-c
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> 
> I wanted to write this email to sound out where the project is, where it is 
> going, and whether or not it has a future.  If it does not have a future, is 
> it time to wrap up the project and move it to the Attic?
> 
> To start with, a bit of context.  This is a summary of the project's commit 
> activity over the previous 22 years:
> 
> [cid:image003.png@01D8DA4E.7333F9C0]
> 
> Back in July 2020, just a little under two years ago, I released Xalan-C 
> 1.12.  This was the first release since Xalan-C 1.11 in October 2012, and it 
> incorporated a number of patches which had been accumulated over the course 
> of years by several downstream distributors.
> https://apache.github.io/xalan-c/releases.html#major-changes shows the major 
> changes in this release.  On the above graph, this release is comprised of 
> the commits from 2019 to 2020.  I was the sole committer for this release.
> 
> The previous 1.11 release was made in October 2012 with Steven J. Hathaway 
> being the principal contributor.
> The previous 1.10 release was made in October 2005 with David N Berton and 
> Dmitry Hayes being the principal contributors.
> The previous 1.9 release was made in December 2004 with June Ng, Matthew 
> Hoyt, David N Berton and Dmitry Hayes being the principal contributors.
> The previous 1.8 release was made in April 2004 with Matthew Hoyt, David N 
> Berton and Dmitry Hayes being the principal contributors.
> 
> The main points I'd like to make here are the following:
> 
> 
>   *   Active development of Xalan-C effectively finished with the 1.10 
> release in 2005.  The vast majority of work since then has been little more 
> than essential bugfixing and portability work to support new platforms and 
> toolchains.
>   *   1.11 was a bugfix release.  It was primarily comprised of essential 
> bugfixes, and fixes for building with different toolchains on different 
> platforms and some documentation work.  There was one code improvement of 
> note: "Add number and nodeset types as top-level stylesheet parameters"
>   *   1.12 was a bugfix release.  It was primarily comprised of essential 
> bugfixes, and fixes for building on different platforms, with the CMake 
> support generalising that to build on current platforms, plus the 
> documentation switch to Markdown.  There were zero new features or 
> improvements outside essential bugfixing.
>   *   There is essentially ~zero developer mailing list activity
>   *   There is essentially ~zero user mailing list activity
>   *   Community involvement on GitHub is present but at very low and sporadic 
> levels.  We have three PRs from contributors other than myself 
> (https://github.com/apache/xalan-c/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed).  One was a 
> triviality, two were portability fixes just altering platform-specific 
> ifdefs.  There is one open PR 
> (https://github.com/apache/xalan-c/pulls?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Apr).  This looks 
> simple but I'm not sure of the impact in case of unexpected subtleties.
> 
> I became involved in the project for pragmatic reasons-I worked on a project 
> using XSLT and picked up Xalan-C as a dependency.  I wrote and contributed 
> the CMake support and worked on the 1.12 release for that reason.  But I 
> don't know the underlying codebase, and I can't do any real feature 
> development or deep bugfixing.  I don't have the expertise with XSLT, or the 
> time to do this.  And since I no longer work on any projects using Xalan-C, 
> I'm no longer realistically able to do any further maintenance work either.  
> If I hadn't done the most recent work and made the 1.12 release, it's most 
> likely that the incorporation of community patchsets and making a point 
> release would not have happened.  No one aside from me has worked on Xalan-C 
> since Steven J Hathaway's last work in 2012.
> 
> I don't personally think there is sufficient community involvement or 
> developer involvement to realistically support Xalan-C as an active project 
> in any sense.  There is no one working on it.  And while I'm sure there are 
> some users, there's next to no active engagement of users as a community.
> 
> I've made a good effort to keep the project going for the near- to 
> medium-term.  The CMake build made it possible to build on all contemporary 
> platforms.  The documentation switch to Markdown made it possible to build 
> without obsolete and unavailable Java libraries.  The bugfixes we included in 
> 1.12 fixed a number of critical issues.  So 1.12 should serve as a usable 
> release for the foreseeable future even in the absence of further development.
> 
> However, I don't see a future for anything beyond 1.12 unless there is a 
> dramatic change.  XSLT usage is declining, and Xalan-C doesn't support XSLT 
> 2.0 and beyond.  Rather than letting the current situation linger on 
> indefinitely, I wanted to suggest we take stock of where we are, and if there 
> is consensus to do so, I think it would be advisable to draw a line at this 
> point and end the project gracefully.
> 
> 
> Kind regards,
> Roger




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