Hi, It saddens me, but we have to discuss the reality.
Taverna have progressed well in the incubator, if slowly. But I think you will agree with me that the activity level has dropped to a minimum during the last year. Note that it is perfectly OK for an Apache project to not be in active development. If you go through the ASF list you will find several mature projects in that state. We said we would release the remaining code bases (e.g. taverna-mobile, taverna-workbench), which beyond "re-engate PPMC" is the only remaining hurdle before we can graduate. While we had some starts at this, we did not go through with it. What distinguishes a "dead" project from a "sleeping" project at ASF will be the ability to prepare, vote and publish releases. This requires a PPMC that is engaged, and volunteer release managers. Now I think we still have enough PPMC folks to do the vote (let's see how many engages in this thread). What we don't seem to have is enough energy/time to prepare and publish releases. I am as guilty as anyone - I had promised to prepare several release candidates for a vote, but dropped the ball. I will admit that preparing release candidates at ASF does take a bit more effort than a quick "git tag" - although we mostly have our instructions and Maven tooling now set up to do it fairly easy. As I pointed out in the September report - given the lack of progress I think we need to seriously discuss the possibility of retiring Taverna from the incubator. There is no shame in this - we've had a good run and done lots of progress - which could live on in a more lightweight fashion, e.g. a GitHub organization. Recently even an active podling retired from the incubator to do this, (although that was over political differences). Retiring means giving up on the Apache name and *.apache.org resources. We could simply change the name back to just "Taverna" and keep it under the Apache License. Practically the package name and Maven coordinates would need to change, as we did for modules we moved to taverna-extra GitHub group earlier. One alternative we have discussed before: shrink the size of Taverna code-base so it's largely what we have already done releases for. We could drop taverna-workbench-* and some plugins. If we then just do a "token" release to show we are still alive then we would be able to crawl into a graduation proposal. After graduation to an ASF project we would need to do board reports and any PMC-level management (typically respond to email requests), but ASF board is not interferring in how often releases are done etc. Given that taverna-mobile is freshly started in the incubator with ASF copyright it would admitedly be a shame to "leave it behind" graduation, but it could be possible to bring it back later. The easiest would however be to do a incubator release of this now to verify that the Intellectual Property is clean. What are your views on the future directions of the Taverna project? Please feel free to contribute, however small comment. -- Stian Soiland-Reyes https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9842-9718
