FM3 is a long shot... Frankly, it's most likely that FM3 will never
be released. Not to discourage anybody, but that's just how it is with most
of these huge refactorings. OTOH it's the only chance of FM on long term.
Because, FM2 is too expensive/painful to develop, as it's a huge pile of
historical baggage (we are talking about code originating from the Dark
Ages of Java), so nobody will want to pick it up when I'm gone.

FM2 will go on (in the foreseeable future). For now the focus should be on
FREEMARKER-35. (I just haven't done much FM recently, but when I do, I
mostly focus on that.) You can look at what was changed in that branch. You
will be able to figure out what you want to look into, I guess. Of course
if you have some concrete questions (why's X thing like that), ask. Also
sporting bugs are highly welcome. Some basic functionality is still missing
though... mostly notably built-ins to deal with type conversion. But you
can specify a dateTimeFormat, dateFormat, or timeFormat, and and if you
crank up incompatibleImprovements to 2.3.32, it should do the right thing
when you print java.time temporals. There's also parsing on the API level.

After that, next for FM2 is adding much better support for other
post-Java-7 features. Like supporting Stream-s. Also supporting
AutoCloseable for Iterator-s and Stream-s. Also supporting records (Java 14
feature).

For the December "sprint", it can happen that after a while I decide that I
would rather add some smaller features (lots of requests have piled up...),
and release 2.3.32 with that, and without FREEMARKER-35. Because it looks
really bad if we have no release for so long.

On Thu, Nov 10, 2022 at 9:18 AM Taher Alkhateeb <ta...@pythys.com.invalid>
wrote:

>
> I would like to help if I can, both to get more familiar with the
> architecture, and maybe to also try to push 3 out the door faster.
>
> Any pointers where to start reading in the code base to understand what's
> happening?
>
> On Thursday, November 10, 2022 10:54 +03, Geoffrey De Smet <
> ge0ffrey.s...@gmail.com> wrote:
>  Great to hear that FREEMARKER-35 is still being worked on.
> I look forward to trying out LocalDate etc in Freemarker.
>
> With kind regards,
> Geoffrey De Smet
>
> On 10/11/2022 00:43, Daniel Dekany wrote:
> > Sorry, I have almost missed the deadline, had no time realistically
> > for comments.
> >
> > I hope that during December I will find substantial time and can push
> > things forward, especially FREEMARKER-35 that should have been finished
> > looong ago. Or figure out how to create a smaller release, because it's
> > really time to do one.
> >
> > On Thu, Nov 10, 2022 at 12:36 AM Daniel Dekany <ddek...@apache.org>
> wrote:
> >
> >> ## Description:
> >>
> >> Apache FreeMarker is a template engine, i.e. a generic tool to generate
> text
> >> output based on templates. Apache FreeMarker is implemented in Java as
> a class
> >> library for programmers.
> >>
> >> FreeMarker 2 (the current stable line) produces releases since 2002.
> >> The FreeMarker project has joined the ASF in 2015, and graduated from
> the
> >> Incubator in early 2018.
> >>
> >> ## Issues:
> >>
> >> There are no issues requiring board attention at this time.
> >>
> >> ## Activity:
> >>
> >> Activity was low in recent months.
> >>
> >> ## Health report:
> >>
> >> Development activity was low in recent months, reaching the next
> release goes slowly.
> >> User questions (mostly on StackOverflow) and new Jira issues are being
> answered promptly.
> >> The short term goal is to polish native java.time support
> (FREEMARKER-35), and release it
> >> with 2.3.32. The long term goal is continuing the ongoing development
> on the 3.0 branch,
> >> so that the project can innovate and the code base can become much
> cleaner and more
> >> attractive for new committers.
> >>
> >>
> >> ## PMC changes:
> >>
> >> - Currently 7 PMC members.
> >> - No changes since the graduation on 2018-03-21
> >>
> >> ## Committer base changes:
> >>
> >> - Currently 8 committers.
> >> - Last added: Siegfried Goeschl on 2020-01-07
> >>
> >> ## Releases:
> >>
> >> - 2.3.31 was released on 2021-02-16
> >>
> >>
>


-- 
Best regards,
Daniel Dekany

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