Thanks for that feedback.
On 9/25/25 6:24 AM, Clebert Suconic wrote:
as to what ActiveMQ wants, I tried to get a consensus from people
yesterday... and everybody I talked would be okay with moving to
something else.
from what I saw, keeping Derby alive would require some work done...
the website is old, it sill using SVN (would be nice to use github, so
people can send pull requests and maintain it).
If you (Rich) and Bryan, or anyone else invovled don't have time to
devote to that, and nobody to cover for it, we should probably look
into replacing it.
On Wed, Sep 24, 2025 at 7:46 PM Rick Hillegas <[email protected]> wrote:
Bryan and I are the last of the Derby developers. However, we no longer
fix bugs. Would ActiveMQ be comfortable if the Derby user list continued
to function and users could still log bugs via JIRA even though the
developer list shut down, distributions disappeared from the Derby
download tab, and it was understood that bugs would not be fixed? I
would be happy to continue to answer the occasional question on the user
list.
On 9/24/25 4:13 PM, Rick Hillegas wrote:
Those are all fine alternatives.
I suspect that if Derby worked well as a testbed for the last decade,
it will continue to work well for the next decade, even without an
active community behind it.
On 9/24/25 2:44 PM, Clebert Suconic wrote:
so, I spoke to folks on our slack channel for ActiveMQ.
We use it for our testsute, and never in production... We can easily
replace it by either dockerized databases (e.g Mysql or Oracle), or
use HSQL / H2.
We would be happy to use it if there's still a community around it,
but if there's not enough community (devs) to keep the project going,
we couldn't find anyone at ActiveMQ willing to maintain it.
We will just watch this space and decide based on the outcome here.
On Wed, Sep 24, 2025 at 3:05 PM Clebert Suconic
<[email protected]> wrote:
I just opened a discussion on ActiveMQ dev list. I would -1 on
retiring it. I'm not active on this co0debase, and I wonder what would
be required to keep it alive?
I hope some other members from the ActiveMQ community could jump on
this discussion as well.
On Wed, Sep 24, 2025 at 3:01 PM Clebert Suconic
<[email protected]> wrote:
I still use Derby as part of ActiveMQ Artemis, and also ActiveMQ
class, for our tests.
As part of our testsuite, I need to validate our basic SQL interfaces
would work as required.. it has been a good tool for our testsuite.
If you intend to retire Derby I wonder what I would use into our
testsuite validation though?
On Wed, Sep 24, 2025 at 2:55 PM Jerry Lampi <[email protected]> wrote:
We use Derby daily. Our customers use Derby daily.
Our sentiments precisely match Roy Minet's:
"Retiring Derby" sounds unnecessarily scary. What it means is
ending further development and support, but Derby will continue to
be alive, well, and available. Is that correct?
I have used Derby for years and have yet to have any problems with
it. I employ a good range of SQL capabilities, but try to avoid
(what I would consider) excessive complexity. Derby is good and
valuable software and I thank you profusely for it!
I'm about five years behind (using 10.14.2.0), but have not so far
been motivated to move to a latter version (if it ain't broke,
don't fix it). Of course, there are alternatives to Derby as well,
but I have not so far seen any reason to change. What I am most
interested in is your advice for someone in my situation.
Stick with 10.14.2.0. It's possible that some change in a latter
version could cause a problem.
Move to (the apparently final version) 10.17.1.0 and "standardize"
on that. There are some enhancements and bug fixes in there that I
may encounter the need for in the future.
Move to one of the other embeddable RDBMS. (Which would you
recommend?)
We are eternally grateful to Rick, Bryan, and the Derby community.
It's a wonderful piece of software.
Jerry Lampi
________________________________
From: Rick Hillegas <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, September 22, 2025 12:26 PM
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>; Derby
Discussion <[email protected]>
Subject: [DISCUSS] Retiring Derby
It has been almost two years since the Derby sub-project published
a new
version. I myself have no interest in managing another Derby release.
Bryan is the only other active Derby committer. Bugs are reported
occasionally but they are never fixed. Mailing-list activity consists
almost entirely of spam rejects. No-one has volunteered to refresh
the
Derby website with the new Apache logo.
I think that the time has come to retire Derby. As I understand
it, this
means putting Derby into a read-only state:
o The Derby repository would become read-only.
o Distributions would be removed from the Download tab.
o The developer and user lists would be closed down. Mailing list
archives would still be browsable.
o A prominent banner would be added to the Derby website landing
page,
stating that Derby was now retired and read-only.
o The Derby website, JIRA, and wiki would be placed in read-only
mode.
Before calling a retirement vote, I would like to give the
developer and
user communities an opportunity to discuss this change.
What are your thoughts?
-Rick
--
Clebert Suconic
--
Clebert Suconic
