Thanks for your comments. And thanks to Roger for the Xalan-C 1.12 release.
The legacy projects I worked on which required Xalan-C have been
retired. The new projects requiring my services leave me with no time to
continue with Xalan-C.
The SaxonC project has received most of the legacy Xalan-C project users
and continues to have support.
The ability to maintain the Xalan-C code base requires extensive C++ and
STL expertise. Newer C++ compiler specifications and deprecation of some
STL templating features required by the current Xalan-C code base make
it difficult to maintain without significant involvement. The project
requires developers that are expert in C++ compiler feature migration
and STL template troubleshooting. The ability to effectively reverse
engineer the C++ and STL code base is almost a necessity.
The dependency on Xerces-C also has maintenance issues. The Xalan-C and
Xerces-C constitutes an orchestrated feature set in order to build
operational libraries.
My passion for Xalan-C still exists, and I have prototypes for new
features, but I have no time to move these prototypes into a production
environment.
IMHO it appears that Xalan-C may be a candidate for the Apache Attic.
Sincerely,
Steven J. Hathaway
On 6/24/2022 6:31 AM, Bill Blough wrote:
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
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