Responses inline. Thanks, -j
On Tue, Oct 9, 2018, at 3:13 AM, Justin Mclean wrote: > Hi, > > > I've been working on a project for 4-5 years now which I think would make a > > good Apache project, at least in terms of it being valuable, high-quality > > software. We're using it internally for our production systems at work, but > > the code is open (hosted on GitHub). Our process to date has been somewhat > > lacking (starting out as a 1-man project, now up to 3-4 regular > > contributors). The project is called Indy > > (https://github.com/Commonjava/indy). > > The project seems small, but you have managed to grow it and have > contributors so congratulations. How large is your user base? Is there > potential for users to become committers in the project? We have a pretty small user base inside Red Hat, mainly concentrated on a single deployment. Outside the company, I really can't say, except that we don't see a lot of traffic on the GitHub site (PRs are mainly people engaged in supporting that internal deployment, some of them hacking from other teams). Our internal exposure is growing as Indy learns to do things like cache/track content downloaded during a build from arbitrary upstream SSL servers. It looks like our install base will be going up, as well as internal users. But I haven't tried to talk about Indy publicly at all, except for the occasional oblique reference to it while discussing other things. > > > With my history working in and promoting the Maven community in the past, > > I'm hesitant to say that I can give Indy the exposure necessary to attract > > a really thriving, diverse community. This is not a strong area for me > > personally, as talking about myself and my work doesn't come naturally. > > Also, I've got a lot of existing commitments in life, many of which revolve > > around Indy at work, but which don't leave a lot of room for doing extra > > promotion work. > > There's more than one way to promote a project, but it can be a lot of > hard work and time and effort. Another Apache project I’m involved in, > is seeing growth after a year of talking to a lot of people, speaking at > conferences, writing articles and q whole lot of other work. Can any of > the other contributors help you in promotion? As it stands now, the other contributors would probably be interested in promoting Indy at local JUGs and such (as am I), but will probably have limited ability to get on the conference circuit. > > > Does the Incubator have some facility or capability to help project teams > > attract a broader community? > > Not explicitly, but often being part of the Apache ecosystem and > interacting with other Apache projects can get more people interested in > your project and become part of your community. Are there any other > apache projects you see synergy with or that could integrate with your > project? Fundamentally, Indy is intended as a means of organizing the sources of content used during builds and build-like activities. We have an ability to do more than that, but IMO the fit could become somewhat awkward the farther afield we go (from build systems). Increasingly, as large enterprise integration and CD-oriented projects start offering automated builds of things like Maven projects during their runtime workflows, it seems like building Indy into the mix would offer a natural way to insulate from network failures outside the bounds of the immediate environment. We dabbled with a trimmed-back version of Indy specifically targeted at embedding, and it wouldn't be hard to open up that line of work again if someone had an interest. I would think that build tools like Maven, Ant, Gradle, PyPI, NPM/Yarn/etc. and things like that would benefit from Indy. Obviously, not all of those are Apache projects, but I'm sure you see what I mean. We refactored the core of Indy to facilitate support for different package types (not just Maven repositories) about a year ago, but we haven't done too much with it yet beyond NPM proxying / hosting support. I'd say we haven't yet proven the Rule of Three for interfaces yet, but we're close. > > Thanks, > Justin > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org
