Hi Roger, First and foremost, thanks for all the work you've done on Xalan.
On Wed, Jun 22, 2022 at 11:21:11PM +0100, rle...@codelibre.net wrote: > > 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. I expect that pretty much all of the systems using Xalan these days are legacy systems. That is, I highly doubt anyone is writing new software that uses it. So the only involvement I would expect would be the occasional reporting of a bug that hasn't turned up yet, or build system or compiler version related issues as systems are upgraded. As far as I can tell, Xalan works well for what it does, and in my experience most legacy software doesn't receive a lot of changes/upgraded other than the bare minimum to stay compliant with audits, etc. As you said, XSLT usage (and XML for that matter) is declining, so in my opinion, doing major feature work (such as supporting newer XSLT standards) has very little to no payoff from a cost/benefit perspective. So in that regard, I agree that Xalan isn't likely to see another major release. However, there are still users, and sometimes things break as systems get upgraded. So I guess a question is, do we feel it's worth it to support these users by way of small maintenance efforts on an as-needed basis, even though we know that usage is trending down over time, and that there will never be another major release? Or, perhaps a bigger question is, will there be enough devs to continue the project, even for just the small maintenance efforts? Forgive me if I'm reading too much into your message, but I'm wondering if you bringing this up is due to wanting to step away from the project? If that's the case, then ultimately we need to determine if there will continue to be enough people to conduct votes. If not, then there will be little choice in the matter. Personally, I'd like to see Xalan stay around, if for no other reason than to continue support for those existing legacy users. Though I realize that's an easy thing for me to say, as I haven't been very active in the past couple of years (in any of the FLOSS projects I'm involved with, not just Xalan specifically). Regardless, thanks for bringing this up. I think it's a good thing for all projects to ask themselves from time to time. Best regards, Bill -- GPG: 5CDD 0C9C F446 BC1B 2509 8791 1762 E022 7034 CF84 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@xalan.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@xalan.apache.org
