I've been away from Xalan -- and from XSLT, and from XML for the most part -- for a decade now. And I'm slightly hamstrung by having been involved in IBM's subsequent XPath/XSLT/XQuery compiler, XTQHP, which was only shipped with Websphere and which few folks ever knew existed; that used a different architecture and I'm not sure how much of what we did could or couldn't be shared at this point.
And of course, there's the
question of finding time. The days of IBM paying us to contribute to
this Apache project are, alas, long past; our contribution helped get
XML bootstrapped, but now that it's sorta self-sustaining there's less
interest in helping push it forward. So if I did it, I'd have to do it on personal time -- and I've already got too much queued up.
Not that half the industry is now running after JSON and (ugh)
YAML and the like, so there's a bit less energy/enthusiasm for XML. In fact, many
of the XML concepts could be trivially reapplied to those just by
replacing parser and serializer and mapping between parsed entities and
macros/imports ... but that seems to have been happening on an ad-hoc,
one-off basis rather than the kind of integration we were getting from
the XML effort.
So... I'd be glad to see it happen, I might be able to make some time to support the effort, but right now I don't think I can offer to help lead.
So... I'd be glad to see it happen, I might be able to make some time to support the effort, but right now I don't think I can offer to help lead.
"Your data is important to us. Please stay on the port, and your connection will be accepted by the next available thread."
-----Roman Shaposhnik <[email protected]> wrote: -----
To: [email protected]
From: Roman Shaposhnik <[email protected]>
Date: 10/17/2018 09:28PM
Cc: Gary Gregory <[email protected]>, [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Subject: Re: Trying to understand the level of activity in Xalan community
From: Roman Shaposhnik <[email protected]>
Date: 10/17/2018 09:28PM
Cc: Gary Gregory <[email protected]>, [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Subject: Re: Trying to understand the level of activity in Xalan community
Michael, Gary, thanks for your replies -- it seems we've got at least
2 active PMC members on the project.
We still need the 3d one however ;-)
I'm also curious what Steven Hathaway is up to, since he's listed as a
current chair and hopefully he's still OK with those responsibilities.
Thanks,
Roman.
On Tue, Oct 9, 2018 at 10:51 AM Michael Glavassevich <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> There are at least a couple people who have shown an interest in contributing who in my opinion should probably be elected as committers and to the PMC. When the PMC got rebooted several years ago I think a lot of us were just enthusiasts for the project (e.g. I care because Xerces depends on Xalan's serializer) who weren't going to be very active from a development perspective, but would help bring new people on who wanted to contribute to Xalan.
>
> On Sun, Oct 7, 2018 at 12:19 PM Gary Gregory <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Roman,
>>
>> Gary Gregory here, PMC member.
>>
>> Your analysis is spot on, there is very little activity on the project.
>>
>> A few years back, I RM'd release 2.7.2 which was a semi obscure exercise as no one was or is around to answer questions as to what branch means what and details about the build.
>>
>> There are pending patches and some interest to see these through, and I would not mind keeping on pushing on. BUT...
>>
>> Stepping back, it is not clean to me how far the Oracle JRE has diverged from Xalan or how relevant Xalan is now compared to the Oracle JRE and Saxon (http://saxon.sourceforge.net/).
>>
>> It seems Xalan has fallen quite far behind Saxon for example.
>>
>> I could see that releasing a 2.7.3 with a bug fixes would help folks.
>>
>> Gary
>>
>> On Sun, Oct 7, 2018 at 8:59 AM Roman Shaposhnik <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi!
>>>
>>> one question that got discussed at the ASF board meeting
>>> last month is that while Xalan user community still shows
>>> interest in the project, the PMC activity seems to be somewhat
>>> lacking.
>>>
>>> As you probably are aware every ASF project requires at least
>>> 3 active PMC members in order to be considered active. My
>>> cursory review of mailing list and JIRA activity shows that out
>>> of the current 7 PMC members:
>>> dbertoni David N Bertoni
>>> gareth Gareth Reakes
>>> ggregory Gary D. Gregory
>>> mrglavas Michael Glavassevich
>>> sanjiva Sanjiva Weerawarana
>>> shathaway Steven J. Hathaway
>>> twilliams Tim Williams
>>> only a few (AKA less than 3 ;-)) show some level of activity.
>>>
>>> If my analysis is wrong -- please let me know (by identifying
>>> yourself as an active PMC member). If not -- I'd love
>>> to see if there's enough interest in user community to keep
>>> PMC active.
>>>
>>> Please let me know either way.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Roman.
2 active PMC members on the project.
We still need the 3d one however ;-)
I'm also curious what Steven Hathaway is up to, since he's listed as a
current chair and hopefully he's still OK with those responsibilities.
Thanks,
Roman.
On Tue, Oct 9, 2018 at 10:51 AM Michael Glavassevich <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> There are at least a couple people who have shown an interest in contributing who in my opinion should probably be elected as committers and to the PMC. When the PMC got rebooted several years ago I think a lot of us were just enthusiasts for the project (e.g. I care because Xerces depends on Xalan's serializer) who weren't going to be very active from a development perspective, but would help bring new people on who wanted to contribute to Xalan.
>
> On Sun, Oct 7, 2018 at 12:19 PM Gary Gregory <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Roman,
>>
>> Gary Gregory here, PMC member.
>>
>> Your analysis is spot on, there is very little activity on the project.
>>
>> A few years back, I RM'd release 2.7.2 which was a semi obscure exercise as no one was or is around to answer questions as to what branch means what and details about the build.
>>
>> There are pending patches and some interest to see these through, and I would not mind keeping on pushing on. BUT...
>>
>> Stepping back, it is not clean to me how far the Oracle JRE has diverged from Xalan or how relevant Xalan is now compared to the Oracle JRE and Saxon (http://saxon.sourceforge.net/).
>>
>> It seems Xalan has fallen quite far behind Saxon for example.
>>
>> I could see that releasing a 2.7.3 with a bug fixes would help folks.
>>
>> Gary
>>
>> On Sun, Oct 7, 2018 at 8:59 AM Roman Shaposhnik <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi!
>>>
>>> one question that got discussed at the ASF board meeting
>>> last month is that while Xalan user community still shows
>>> interest in the project, the PMC activity seems to be somewhat
>>> lacking.
>>>
>>> As you probably are aware every ASF project requires at least
>>> 3 active PMC members in order to be considered active. My
>>> cursory review of mailing list and JIRA activity shows that out
>>> of the current 7 PMC members:
>>> dbertoni David N Bertoni
>>> gareth Gareth Reakes
>>> ggregory Gary D. Gregory
>>> mrglavas Michael Glavassevich
>>> sanjiva Sanjiva Weerawarana
>>> shathaway Steven J. Hathaway
>>> twilliams Tim Williams
>>> only a few (AKA less than 3 ;-)) show some level of activity.
>>>
>>> If my analysis is wrong -- please let me know (by identifying
>>> yourself as an active PMC member). If not -- I'd love
>>> to see if there's enough interest in user community to keep
>>> PMC active.
>>>
>>> Please let me know either way.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Roman.
