DISCLAIMER: This is a non-technical proposal to make a project decision. Per our Bylaws[1], this means that it should "normally be made with lazy consensus, or by the entire community using discussion-led consensus-building, and not through formal voting." However, since the intent is to make a significant policy change, this concrete proposal should be considered as a *lazy consensus* decision with a *7 day* timeframe (expiring on or about 2017-07-11, 23:59 UTC. Please give this thread your ample consideration.
I would like to table[2] a proposal to terminate official Apache support for CouchDB 1.x. This means that: 1. The Apache CouchDB project will no longer make new 1.x releases. 2. All remaining 1.x issues in JIRA and GH Issues will be closed. 3. Everyone can continue to use 1.x as long as they want. 4. People are welcome to continue discussing 1.x on the users@ list. The reason is simple: no one is maintaining the 1.x.x branches of CouchDB anymore. Issues stack up on the tracker[3] with no response. Original grand plans of back-porting 2.x features such as Mango to 1.x have not materialised. And when important security issues surface[4], having to patch 1.x as well as 2.x slows down the security team's ability to push releases quickly out the door. By focusing on what we do best - supporting 2.x and beyond with bug fixes, new features, and ever-improving documentation and web UI - we can improve our release cadence and avoid misleading our user base with false promises. THAT SAID: There are two important footnotes to the proposal. FIRST: If a group of interested maintainers start making active efforts to improve 1.x branch upkeep, I can speak with the full authority of the PMC to say that we'll endorse those efforts. But to un-mothball 1.x officially should require more than 1-2 people doing occasional bugfixing work. I'd personally want to see at least a 3-person team making sustained contributions to 1.x before re-activating official releases. Also, that work would need to be in-line with work currently happening on master; I wouldn't want to see new 1.x features materialise that don't have parallel commits to master. (Much preferred would be to see people fixing the things in 2.x that prevent people migrating off of 1.x instead.) SECOND: Let a thousand forks bloom. If you're looking to build a CouchDB 1.x fork that has baked in geo/full text search, Mango, Fauxton, and can run on VMS, OS/2 Warp 4, NeXTStep 3.x, and Palm, have at it. I'll even write a blog post about your project. (Sounds interesting!) Again, this proposal defaults to lazy consensus with a 7-day expiry period. CouchDB committers have binding "votes" on this proposal. Thanks for your consideration, Joan "to infinity, and beyond" Touzet [1] http://couchdb.apache.org/bylaws.html#decisions [2] In the non-U.S. sense of the word, i.e., meaning to begin consideration of a proposal. [3] https://s.apache.org/couchdb-1.x-issues [4] https://s.apache.org/wdnW
