Hello,
On Wed, 19 Oct 2022 13:55:02 +0000 Rob Conde <rob.co...@ai-solutions.com> wrote:
> I don't think I "have any vote" here, but I feel similar to Scott. My project
> is happily using xerces-c/xalan-c for a quite a long time. On our side, we're
> not asking any questions on the mailing lists generally because it works for
> what we need - there's nothing to ask per se. I have seen several other large
> vendors using xalan-c, based on the fact that they deliver the dlls. I think
> xerces/xalan is actively in use, even if maybe it doesn't appear that way.
>
> My primary concern is that xerces/xalan continue to build/run on new
> compilers - I don't expect any new features. I have also found that migration
> to other libraries is certainly not a no-brainer.
>
> I sympathize with the desire to wind this down, and certainly Roger you
> shouldn't be somehow forced to continue involvement, but it does seem
> premature to "put it in the attic"...although maybe another issue is defining
> what that really means.
+1 with all 3 paragraphs.
Regards,
> ________________________________
> From: Scott Furry <scott.wl.fu...@gmail.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2022 3:13 AM
> To: c-users@xalan.apache.org <c-users@xalan.apache.org>;
> d...@xalan.apache.org <d...@xalan.apache.org>
> Subject: Re: [VOTE] Moving Xalan-C to the Attic
>
> I'm only an occasional user of Xerces-C/Xalan-C libraries but retirement
> seems wrong to me. Understandable. Lamentable. Still wrong.
>
> Reading the suggestion of placing Xalan-C into 'the attic', I dove online to
> plan a migration strategy should it become necessary. I was not pleased with
> what I found:
> - Saxon has a `community edition` but is only interested in selling licenses.
> - Folks over at libxml2/libxslt go to great lengths to stipulate that Gnome
> is not required - but library has its 'C' quirks. C++ wrappers of various
> type and quality abound.
>
> The previous move by Oracle to 'abandoned' the Netbeans IDE to the Apache
> Foundation was not pleasant for me. After seven release iterations the IDE
> still doesn't have a decent C/C++ setup comparable to the Netbeans 8.2
> plugin. Everyone in the Apache Netbeans project seems focused on Java. I have
> an overall negative impression of Apache projects as a result.
>
> I can appreciate that few have the time and resources to commit to maintain
> code. We've gone from "The Cathedral and The Bazaar" to silos ("Big Box
> Stores") of companies - Ubuntu, Gnome, Red Hat, et al. The notion of the
> dedicated developer toiling away doing incredible work in obscurity is
> becoming quaint. XKCD pretty much nailed it with the 'Dependency' comic
> (https://xkcd.com/2347/).
>
> Given the long history of the Xerces-C/Xalan-C, as well as few decent
> compatible replacements, I would hope the code could be maintained in the
> future.
>
> /rant
> Scott
>
>
> On 2022-10-17 11:43, Roger Leigh wrote:
>
> Hi Gary,
>
>
>
>
>
> Thanks to you and everyone else for responding. It looks like the final
> tally is 3 (a) and 1 (b). I hope this meets the required quorum.
>
>
>
> So assuming this is OK with everyone, would it be OK for you as the PMC
> chairman to handle the moving of the Xalan-C project to the Attic? Would it
> also be possible to remove me from the PMC (or does the PMC get dissolved
> entirely)?
>
>
>
> Do we want to recommend that organisations such as the various distributors
> of Xalan-C retire it at this time as well? Or just notify them of the move
> to the Attic and let them exercise their own judgement on the risks?
>
>
>
>
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Roger
>
>
>
> From: Gary Gregory <garydgreg...@gmail.com><mailto:garydgreg...@gmail.com>
> Sent: 15 October 2022 12:42
> To: d...@xalan.apache.org<mailto:d...@xalan.apache.org>
> Cc: c-users@xalan.apache.org<mailto:c-users@xalan.apache.org>
> Subject: Re: [VOTE] Moving Xalan-C to the Attic
>
>
>
> Retirement of Xalan-C seems ok to me if only due to my lack of involvement
> with it; I've only helped on the Java side IIRC. So that would be (a) for me.
>
>
>
> Gary
>
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 7, 2022, 08:19 Roger Leigh
> <rle...@codelibre.net<mailto:rle...@codelibre.net>> 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<mailto:rle...@codelibre.net>
> <rle...@codelibre.net<mailto:rle...@codelibre.net>>
> Sent: 22 June 2022 23:21
> To: d...@xalan.apache.org<mailto:d...@xalan.apache.org>;
> c-users@xalan.apache.org<mailto: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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