Jakarta Board Report First of all I like to mention that I haven't be able to spent the time I wanted to spend, which is something I will try to improve. I like to request special attention is given to the POI subproject section in the report. Another improvement should be that the majority of the report should come from the community, which I am totally failing to delegate atm. I will start actively persuing additions to the board report by our Jakarta committers when events occur. I don't see this as a community problem, the failure is completely mine.
Apachecon Austin was my first visit to apachecon and it was a great experience to meet the people I haven't met in person yet. One of the things I had planned was the Jakarta BOF, where I had the idea to give a presentation and get feedback on other peoples thoughts about Jakarta. It gave me some more insight in projects I didn't have too much knowledge about and the nature of the BOF turned out to be more of free discussion and thought outlet. On my todo list is to extract the points that were identified as needing attention and send them to the general list for discussion. Most important on that list is the identity of Jakarta, easy access information of the state the projects are in and Jakarta being more proactive of getting people aboard on the less active or non active projects. Another idea the recently popped up is having experienced mentors "assigned" to projects. With a 100+ projects this seems like a good idea (see JCS for an example of this) PMC : New pmc members: Nick Burch Roland Weber Change : Dany Angus requested to be removed from the PMC. Not acted upon this yet, since he is an ASF member, a change in the committee-info.txt probably is sufficient. New committers : Jurgen Hoffmann was voted on to be able to commit to Jakarta. He earned this because of his devotion on Turbine. Antoine Levy-Lambert, so he can work on Slide (on his own request and voted on by the PMC). Releases : - HttpComponents HttpCore 4.0-alpha3 - Commons Digester 1.8 - Commons Discovery 0.4 - Commons DbUtils 1.1 - Commons Validator 1.3.1 - Commons HttpClient 3.1-beta1 - BSF 2.4.0 - Commons Lang 2.2 - Commons Configuration 1.3 Not yet project commons-ssl: There were announcements on the httpcomponents list (and on the tomcat list) about a release of commons-ssl, which in real life isn't a commons project at all, but an external project, with the intention of joining Jakarta. An CLA is on file and currently an envelope is on the way to Jim, since his employer wants to have a signed copy back. I asked Julius Davies if he could start a proposal on the Jakarta to discuss if we could sponsor the donation. The thread kind of died and I will restart the thread when the paperwork is handled. place. Julies fixed the naming of commons-ssl by calling it Not-Yet-Commons-ssl, with giving an explenation. Link can be found here : http://juliusdavies.ca/commons-ssl/ Projects (currently 15 main projects) BCEL Bcel hardly has any activity and during the BOF I learned that Torsten Curdt adopted BCEL. With the Google summer of code Torsten mentored 1 person working on BCEL and BCEL supports 1.5 now. It could be worth investigating if the 2 forks of BCEL that are out there (Findbugs and AspectJ) can be merged back to BCEL itself, however Torsten said that both forks probably don't want to invest there time in a merge, since the current situation works for them. Currently BCEL is considered legacy and since projects are using it, it is still maintained. If there are signals of people wanting to become active, we will definitely take that opportunity. BSF After about 4 years of no releases, BSF finally got their release, which was in the Apachecon press release. Since the release things have become a bit more quiet and the user list still points to fact that not a lot of users have picked up on the release yet, since there were problems with the downloadscript. It will probably also take time to get the users back that were lost in the past by not having any releases. Personal note : I would like to thank the BSF committers for doing a great job. Cactus Cactus is currently unmaintained. There are still users, but most questions don't get an answer. A lot of people also are wondering if maven2 will be supported and with what j2ee versions cactus will work. There is definitely work to do here (Cargo integration comes to mind). Commons Commons has 33 proper, 11 sandbox and 16 dormant subprojects. Currently there is a huge release boom going on at commons. After past problems with votes not getting any attention I think things have picked up for the better and most votes get attention. The situation is still not perfect and still needs focus. ECS ECS is mature / dormant. The dev list had it's last noise in August. The user list didn't have any traffic since April, which kind of looks like there isn't a user base. Will make this an agenda item. HttpComponents Currently has 3 subprojects : httpasync, httpclient and httpcore. There is lots of activity from developers and from users. Also there are regular releases. JCS As mentioned in previous board reports there was a vote about a release, but no release has happened just yet. Henning Schmiedenhausen offered to mentor the currently active release manager Aaron Smuts. Besides that there isn't much development activity in JCS. There is some user traffic and questions get answered. JMeter Lot's of developer activity and user activity at JMeter. The only thing that is a bit worrying is that Sebastian Bazley is the only committer. I've added this to my todo list to see if there are other candidates to help him out. ORO Very little activity and no developer activity. ORO is very mature. Added to the agenda to see where to go from here. POI There is lot's of activity in POI on developer and user side. Most of the work is done by Nick Burch. Recently a release vote was held, without any visible result. By accident I stumbled on the release announcement made on the POI user list. There was no vote result posted, no checking of the release itself and the PMC wasn't notified of that result. There are currently several issues at POI : - The Jakarta PMC Members that supposed to represent POI and thus (at least) giving oversight to what happens in POI, don't provide that oversight. - It feels like they are acting as a separate entity in Jakarta and even the ASF itself. - There seems to be some legal thing in place where people who want to become a committer need to "swear" that they are not under an NDA from Micrsoft about the office document format. At Apachecon I talked to Jim about this and he isn't aware of anything in place from the board pov (I can confirm that even from the PMC pov we don't have any records of those statements). Besides that we have an ICLA/CCLA to cover this situation. - svn karma is separate from the rest of Jakarta, because of above legal reasons (in March there was voted to open up Jakart svn karma, POI objected to this, so there karma is handled separately. With the release going bad, I decided to start a vote on the general list to open up svn karma for POI. The initial goal I have with this vote, is to make sure that they finally completely join Jakarta, without any exceptions. As a side effect it will remove the psychological barrier that exists when it concerns POI. We trust them to with svn karma for Jakarta and they don't trust us with svn karma. There shouldn't be a need for distrust or this separation. The thing I was warned for with this vote, is that the legal issue would surface and indeed it did. The highest legal priority currently is, at least in my view, the releases that don't conform to ASF standards. If we solve that my next step was (based on the feedback), starting with clearing up and fixing the legal situation for contributing and committing to POI (if that is needed at all). People in the threads refer to the Harmony case, where they require something similar. The big difference is that the PMC handles this and in the POI case no one handles this (at least to my knowledge). The vote is still up untill next friday / saturday. If there are any questions, let me know. Henri is monitoring and participating in the thread and Jim was informed about the thread. Regexp Very little activity and no developer activity. Regexp is very mature. Added to the agenda to see where to go from here. Slide Antoine Levy-Lambert requested karma for Jakarta to be able to work on Slide. Slide still has a user base, but is lacking developers, so we welcomed his request. Antoine said he needed time to get into the code base, so it might take time to get really productive. User questions are mainly answered by other users and some questions stay unanswered Taglibs Has 20 proper, 5 sandbox and 8 deprecated tag libraries. Currently there is a discussion going about going beyond the spec with the standards taglib. Some patching is taking place in the standard taglib and in the RDC taglib. There are regular questions on the user list and all questions are answered. Turbine Turbine exists of 3 subprojects : core, fulcrum and stratum. There is activity from multiple people (svn and wiki), but Jurgen Hoffmann is the one with most cycled to spare for Turbine development. User list seems healthy, where most questions get answers. Velocity The board approved the establishement of the TLP Velocity project. Since you already 2 board reports about Velocity, I don't think it's useful to add a status update. I am aware of the reports and I have no items to add on the todo's of the move. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
