Hi Echarts PPMC and contributor team >From the ECharts incubator report, Echarts is facing serious issues of following the Apache way. ECharts has been in Apache Incubator 1.5 years, which is a long time. But the ECharts still acts like a GitHub OSS, rather than Apache project. In Apache, we are helping project believing the Apache way, rather than convincing or forcing project to do something. The progress of ECharts makes a lot of concerns in Incubator. As in my personal connection w/ ECharts PPMC members, Wenli and Zhongyi, they still think Echarts want to be part of the foundation, I am doing this review report as a shepherd perspective.
I hope the following *SERIOUS* issues could be fixed as quickly as possible, and showing the incubator ECharts community is embracing the Apache Wa 1. Mail list communication. Today, Mail list has very little traffic, any decision made is not forwarding to it, even if some discussions happen at GitHub. 2. Chinese is still widely used in GitHub. I am also a native Mandarin speaker, but the purpose of being in the Foundation is looking forward to wider/global users, so we need English. Translation service could be used if the PPMC think English is a block. But for my personal perspective, maybe many people English is not very good, but good enough to understand. The community just needs to be guided. 3. Serious Branding Issue. https://echarts.baidu.com/ needs to be abandoned, including Baidu advertising in this page 4. Community build lacked. Developer lacked. From my OSS experiences, js project should have more codes contributors, especially for a widely-used project like ECharts. Even I know, there are different ways to project contributions, but still too less. Only 7 contribute codes over 100 lines. At the same time, the top 2 contribute 100k+ and 5k+ lines. This is more serious issue than just diversity lacked. If the top 2 left or are busy in some cases, the project would stop. 5. Mentors feel without PPMC and community feedback/support. Mentors from Foundations are volunteers to offer help, these help only work when you are willing to learn. I don't have so much to say about this, this depends on PPMC and contributor team willings. 6. Who will do mental lead? The community in Apache should be(but not yet for ECharts) diversity, but I hope/think someone from PPMC could step out, do the lead. Such as starting the discussion about report, feature roadmap, release plan, community event. This could be not a single individual, but really require PPMC show up. 7. No one update the Incubator status page. https://incubator.apache.org/projects/echarts.html No progress shows there. 8. Chinese and English websites are not the same. As a native Mandarin, this issue shows up. This should not happen. Chinese website should be a translation version only, nothing more. 9. Why master branch codes have a big gap with the release version. In release page, https://github.com/apache/incubator-echarts/releases, the number of commit differences keep > 300. Why? Where is the real release code? 10. Unofficial release page with unexpected releases. https://echarts.apache.org/zh/dist/, list in ZH website, https://echarts.apache.org/zh/download.html. But not showing at EN page. I don't know what are they. 11. A lot of unofficial releases show up in GitHub release page. https://github.com/apache/incubator-echarts/releases. In the release page, only 4.2.1 and 4.1.0(I assume these two passed the incubator votes). In that release page, a lot of releases made by core contributor with changelog. 12. Official GitHub page pointing download page to 3rd party pages, including EN. https://github.com/apache/incubator-echarts#get-echarts 13. Branding issue about `Official Extensions`( https://github.com/apache/incubator-echarts#official-extensions). If it is official, it should be hosted in Apache, but clearly, they are not. 14. Branding even IP issue about `Developers Contributions`, listed in official GitHub readme. https://github.com/apache/incubator-echarts#developers-contributions. Many individual names listed there, are they part of ECharts? Suggestions Please PPMC could consider to work on the report(even not officially for Incubator), which help you to review the project. All above opinions are myself only. I am going to help review if you have report rather than I need to spend several hours to review your repo, website and all other resources. You have many riche experienced mentors, please work with them ASAP. Sheng Wu 吴晟 Apache SkyWalking, Apache ShardingSphere(Incubating), Apache Incubator Twitter, wusheng1108
