Hi Charles-François, thanks for your detailed message, you captured important points, and I think I agree with your sentiment here. Mesos might still have a place, and before thinking about what new features to add, the project first needs to solve more fundamental issues.
My previous pessimistic assessment on this list came from a similar angle but I think with wider scope: a healthy project requires a healthy community where users can find help, but also can have some hope that important issues will get fixed. I have not been able to spend much time on Mesos in the last year, but was following Slack and the mailing lists (the ones with humans and the ones with bots). On the mailing lists I see users ask for help with issues they run into or questions, but only rarely will get a response from committers or other community members. Few new JIRA issues were filed in the since fall 2020, but hardly any of them have been triaged let alone fixed (this is on top of the existing bug backlog). I do not think one needs to be a committer to improve on that situation if one can get help getting patches discussed, reviewed and ultimately merged. It looks like Andrei and Qian have committed to help on the latter, but I have only rarely seen community members volunteer for the former. When I wrote that I thought starting a new project on top of Apache Mesos today might be not a good idea, I mainly came from that angle. While the software does work for many use cases it seems to be unmaintained with hardly any folks active in taking it further globally, beyond their own immediate needs, and willing to take on the needed work. Being a top-level Apache project with a strong history, Apache Mesos still has a brand, but I don't think it has lived up to the associated expectations. Similarly, big ownership gaps (technical and project-wise) have developed which neither active committers nor community members have filled. Again, one would not need to be a committer to develop expertise and contribute, and actually the natural and historic process was for folks to do exactly that with committership being a thing only after getting involved (see https://community.apache.org/newcommitter.html for Apache's high-level view on that). This is the issue of continued trust Renan mentioned in their message to the user mailing list which I also believe is critical so the project can live up to its promise (this is integral to being an Apache project, see e.g., https://www.apache.org/theapacheway). As a non-user with emotional attachment to the historic Apache Mesos brand, my list of areas in need of improvement to resurrect this project would be: - willingness of remaining active committers to be active on a regular basis in engagements with the community, both on the user and contributor side (in PRs, review requests, on mailing lists), - transparent and active discussions in the community, among committers and contributors, and among committers, in applicable form, beyond roll calls, - timely and consistent process to address user issues, and - consistent ownership of the bug and feature backlog. Note that work on new feature requests is absent from my list. That folks want to discuss that here and now seems to me to be another sign that the Mesos community is not in a good place given all its existing non-technical issues. Best, Benjamin
