Hey Robert, I think you've touched an important point below, and allow me to address:
On Sun, Jan 11, 2026 at 7:23 PM Robert Middleton <[email protected]> wrote: > While I don't have hard numbers, it does feel that the number of > messages on the mailing list has gone down since RTC was implemented, > which implies to me that there's less discussion activity. > Unless it is necessary, I personally don't carry any development-related discussion to the mailing list anymore, and one can see this has already been like this before 2024 ― recall that RTC was introduced on 2025-04-10. That is, even when Piotr and I were full-time funded on Log4j in 2024, we were only bringing necessary discussion to the mailing list. Because, IMO, I don't see anybody helping besides us two. Christian and Piotr at some point thought we were overwhelming other non-paid maintainers, and this is the reason behind the friction between two groups, let's introduce some sort of newsletter for our STF-funded development efforts. Guess what happened? Other maintainers did not even react, and Piotr and Christian rightfully stopped with the newsletter after a couple of attempts. In short, yes, the mailing list traffic has decreased, but this is not correlated with RTC. I think the right metric is triaged issues and pushed commits, and these are stable, see my earlier response <https://lists.apache.org/thread/wl1y76q7bhfl1sv9sh2g964bc57llytm> for exact figures. AFAICT, the bottom line is, people who are actively contributing have no problem with RTC; on the contrary, they support it wholeheartedly. On the other hand, there is this other group of maintainers, whom contribute seldom, have PRs pending for their attention to reviews, (almost) never help with external PRs/Issues, they just want to push two lines of code for their weekend projects, and return back to their $dayjobs. I am also not able to understand the "$WORK type of job" argument. You do RTC at work for a reason, right? Doesn't that reason apply to Log4j? Log4j is probably more important than any piece of software we deliver in our $dayjobs. Doesn't it deserve to be developed with software development best practices? I'm tired of hearing "bureaucratic wall" blah blah. Do you want to help with the Log4j development? Great! There are dozens of tasks waiting for your attention in here <https://github.com/apache/logging-log4j2/issues> and here <https://github.com/apache/logging-log4j2/pull>.
