Hi All,
It feels to me like your expectations are unrealistic, or perhaps you don't
know enough about using open-source software. The responsibility is yours to
get involved to make sure any project stays alive. This examplifies the
opposite of engagement:
"On our side, we're not asking any questions on the mailing lists generally
because it works for what we need - there's nothing to ask per see."
This is just selfish from my FOSS POV. There might not be anything to ask, but
there could be things to SAY.
You should: Answer users' questions that are obvious to you. Scan Jira and
GitHub to see if you can fix issues BUT... The level of activity on the mailing
list, JIRA, and GitHub should be an obvious indication of the health of the
project, which has been low for a long time. If you don't see new users asking
noob questions, that just means the project is aging out. Which is where we've
arrived sadly.
One scenario for you is to fork the project on GitHub and start a new
community. Or not. Up to you.
Gary
On 2022/10/19 13:55:02 Rob Conde wrote:
> I don't think I "have any vote" here, but I feel similar to Scott. My project
> is happily using xerces-c/xalan-c for a quite a long time. On our side, we're
> not asking any questions on the mailing lists generally because it works for
> what we need - there's nothing to ask per se. I have seen several other large
> vendors using xalan-c, based on the fact that they deliver the dlls. I think
> xerces/xalan is actively in use, even if maybe it doesn't appear that way.
>
> My primary concern is that xerces/xalan continue to build/run on new
> compilers - I don't expect any new features. I have also found that migration
> to other libraries is certainly not a no-brainer.
>
> I sympathize with the desire to wind this down, and certainly Roger you
> shouldn't be somehow forced to continue involvement, but it does seem
> premature to "put it in the attic"...although maybe another issue is defining
> what that really means.
>
> Rob Conde
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Scott Furry <scott.wl.fu...@gmail.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2022 3:13 AM
> To: c-us...@xalan.apache.org <c-us...@xalan.apache.org>; dev@xalan.apache.org
> <dev@xalan.apache.org>
> Subject: Re: [VOTE] Moving Xalan-C to the Attic
>
> I'm only an occasional user of Xerces-C/Xalan-C libraries but retirement
> seems wrong to me. Understandable. Lamentable. Still wrong.
>
> Reading the suggestion of placing Xalan-C into 'the attic', I dove online to
> plan a migration strategy should it become necessary. I was not pleased with
> what I found:
> - Saxon has a `community edition` but is only interested in selling licenses.
> - Folks over at libxml2/libxslt go to great lengths to stipulate that Gnome
> is not required - but library has its 'C' quirks. C++ wrappers of various
> type and quality abound.
>
> The previous move by Oracle to 'abandoned' the Netbeans IDE to the Apache
> Foundation was not pleasant for me. After seven release iterations the IDE
> still doesn't have a decent C/C++ setup comparable to the Netbeans 8.2
> plugin. Everyone in the Apache Netbeans project seems focused on Java. I have
> an overall negative impression of Apache projects as a result.
>
> I can appreciate that few have the time and resources to commit to maintain
> code. We've gone from "The Cathedral and The Bazaar" to silos ("Big Box
> Stores") of companies - Ubuntu, Gnome, Red Hat, et al. The notion of the
> dedicated developer toiling away doing incredible work in obscurity is
> becoming quaint. XKCD pretty much nailed it with the 'Dependency' comic
> (https://xkcd.com/2347/).
>
> Given the long history of the Xerces-C/Xalan-C, as well as few decent
> compatible replacements, I would hope the code could be maintained in the
> future.
>
> /rant
> Scott
>
>
> On 2022-10-17 11:43, Roger Leigh wrote:
>
> Hi Gary,
>
>
>
>
>
> Thanks to you and everyone else for responding. It looks like the final
> tally is 3 (a) and 1 (b). I hope this meets the required quorum.
>
>
>
> So assuming this is OK with everyone, would it be OK for you as the PMC
> chairman to handle the moving of the Xalan-C project to the Attic? Would it
> also be possible to remove me from the PMC (or does the PMC get dissolved
> entirely)?
>
>
>
> Do we want to recommend that organisations such as the various distributors
> of Xalan-C retire it at this time as well? Or just notify them of the move
> to the Attic and let them exercise their own judgement on the risks?
>
>
>
>
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Roger
>
>
>
> From: Gary Gregory <garydgreg...@gmail.com><mailto:garydgreg...@gmail.com>
> Sent: 15 October 2022 12:42
> To: dev@xalan.apache.org<mailto:dev@xalan.apache.org>
> Cc: c-us...@xalan.apache.org<mailto:c-us...@xalan.apache.org>
> Subject: Re: [VOTE] Moving Xalan-C to the Attic
>
>
>
> Retirement of Xalan-C seems ok to me if only due to my lack of involvement
> with it; I've only helped on the Java side IIRC. So that would be (a) for me.
>
>
>
> Gary
>
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 7, 2022, 08:19 Roger Leigh
> <rle...@codelibre.net<mailto:rle...@codelibre.net>> wrote:
>
> 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).
>
>
>
>
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Roger
>
>
>
> From: rle...@codelibre.net<mailto:rle...@codelibre.net>
> <rle...@codelibre.net<mailto:rle...@codelibre.net>>
> Sent: 22 June 2022 23:21
> To: dev@xalan.apache.org<mailto:dev@xalan.apache.org>;
> c-us...@xalan.apache.org<mailto:c-us...@xalan.apache.org>
> Subject: Future of xalan-c
>
>
>
> 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:
>
>
>
> [cid:image003.png@01D8DA4E.7333F9C0]
>
>
>
> 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
>
>
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