Not that I have a vote, but I have to agree with retiring it.
Xalan-C was a port of the original Xalan-J. (Well, of the original
LotusXSL, actually.) We did a *lot* of redesign of Xalan-J over the
years, to the point where I had trouble remembering enough of the
original design to patch Xalan-C without reverse-engineering my way back
into it. (Admittely I'm not really a C++ coder; I've just seen enough
languages and libraries to let me fake it.)
Xalan-C isn't just a port of the current Java code; keeping it going
would mean continuing to support two significantly different designs.
Open source lives or dies on involvement from folks who don't just
consume the code but are willing to help maintain it. At this point
Xalan-C doesn't seem to have the core community needed to remain viable.
Retiring doesn't mean folks can't use it; it just means they have to
understand that they have to organize their own support until and unless
people step forward and say they want to get involved in supporting it
for everyone. We can always bring it back from retirement if and when
that happens; meanwhile it's time to set the expectations properly and
put it on pause.
We retired Xalan-J 1.0 when we introduced 2.0. Time to retire its C++
brother.
On 10/14/2022 4:35 PM, Roger Leigh wrote:
Summary of votes so far:
1 for retiring
1 for keeping the project going
This wasn’t strictly following the Apache voting guidelines, having a
read of them. However, unless anyone else would like to add to the
discussion or cast their vote (I’ll check back on Sunday), we
currently have a tie here.
With regard to keeping the project going, I would like to have a bit
more discussion about that. What does the “status quo” keep things as
they are option actually mean, in the absence of any active
maintenance? I’m not very happy with that situation because of how
misleading this is to end users. The primary reason of suggesting the
move to the Attic is to clearly indicate that the project is
unmaintained. It can always be resurrected in the future if there is
a demand for it. But after the “reboot” of the PMC, how much work has
concretely been done by anyone except for myself? If you look at the
codebase, the answer is nothing at all. Nothing has been contributed
at all. The project is dead. When I leave it will live on as a
zombie, but will be in practice completely unmaintained. I would very
much like for us to be able to come to a definitive consensus here
which is realistic about the prospects for this project, but that will
require some active participation from the current PMC and any other
participants for it to be possible.
Kind regards,
Roger
*From:*Roger Leigh <rle...@codelibre.net>
*Sent:* 07 October 2022 13:19
*To:* dev@xalan.apache.org; c-us...@xalan.apache.org
*Subject:* [VOTE] Moving Xalan-C to the Attic
Dear all,
It’s been over three months since my original email on this subject.
There is a related discussion about this on the Xerces-C++ mailing
list just now, and it would be useful to reach a conclusion on this
for Xalan-C as well.
I've updated the git statistics I did earlier in the year, which can
be viewed or downloaded here: xerces-xalan-git-monthly.xlsx
icon xerces-xalan-git-monthly.xlsx
<https://codelibreconsulting.sharepoint.com/:x:/s/Opensourcesoftware/EabAzxgzU3pCjUSKSVvWjZgBlUGZUb91q2PVMkGk1oaIHw?e=MVBvPA>.
There are no changes—there has not been a single commit to the source
repository since 2021. There has not been any change to the
maintenance status of the project since my last email: there are no
active maintainers, no one has shown any interest in doing any
maintenance, and none of the previous maintainers who are still
present actually use Xalan any longer—so there is little prospect of
previously active maintainers returning. I myself will be leaving the
project once this question is answered irrespective of the outcome—I
no longer use Xalan-C, I have no time to commit to it for future work
and releases, I just want to see it retired gracefully so that we
don’t leave anyone with the mistaken impression that this is a project
which is active and well supported when it is most certainly not.
This is not a library which new projects should be considering to use.
This is the commit history since 01 Oct 2012:
$ git shortlog -s --oneline --all --since "01 OCT 2012"
1 Benjamin Beasley
1 Bill Blough
1 Biswapriyo Nath
1 Kvarec Lezki
182 Roger Leigh
29 Steven J. Hathaway
I would like for the PMC to vote on the future of the project. Do we
1. Retire the project to the Attic
2. Keep the project going
I’m not sure if I’m formally a PMC member or not, but realistically
I’m the only one who has done any work on the project for the past 8
years. So if I can vote on this I’ll vote for (a).
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