It feels like they are acting as a separate entity in Jakarta and
even the ASF itself

Let me put on record my severe objection to this statement.

Regards
-
Avik

Quoting Martin van den Bemt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:


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.

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