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: 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
