Hello dev mailing list! Sorry I haven't subscribed earlier. Actually I had, but somehow unsubscribed again. However, I am a user of freemarker for various projects. One of the projects is the Apache Shiro site (via jbake), then my personal blog and a not-so-tiny project at work.
However, I recently wanted to contribute back. As a Maven PMC member, I spotted FREEMARKER-7 right away (migrate to maven) and opened PR 96: https://github.com/apache/freemarker/pull/96 However, I learned that there's a "more recent" branch which already got converted to Gradle or at least will be. Then I saw another issue (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FREEMARKER-204) which unfortunately has not been linked to FREEMARKER-7 and the vote on the mailing lists which way to go has not been documented in either of those issues. Anyway, with that gone, I wonder where I could actually contribute. My (personal) dearest which would have been to move the 3-branch to 4 to make room for another "intermedia" 3.0.0 release which only differs from the current 2.x branch by: * Adding an additional jar with jakarta-classifier (maven-terminology) * Maybe move to Java 11 * proper module-info (could also be done on Java 8 if set up properly) * Maybe drop old servlet 2.0 support, along with old JSP to have less duplicated code * Maven, if it helped (but that would probably not be worth it with the project already going to Gradle). * Relocation preparation (from freemarker to org.freemarker or org.apache.freemarker) * Adjusting the module name accordingly. The idea is to ease migration a bit by adding a simpler intermedia release. I would like to hear from the community what you all would think of this idea. * No package relocation required * No work for consumers (ie users) * No work for migrating the current 3-branch except renaming the branch Best regards, - Ben
