I'm responding to Stefan's call-to-arms, though I have limited time available, currently probably not more than a day or two a month.
Given my lack of time I would probably want to get involved in specific short-term tasks, such as taking on issues from the issue tracker, rather than being a driver to shape the future of log4net. I have been involved recently in writing a custom asynchronous appender that logs to a WebAPI, so asynchronous appenders is one area I could get involved in. One thing I'd personally like to see is to drop support for some legacy platforms: - The few .NET 1.x users left are probably adequately served by existing versions of log4net. - It's not onerous for .NET 2.0/3.0 users to upgrade to .NET 3.5, so these could maybe be dropped too (existing apps don't need to be rebuilt; they just need to ensure 3.5 is installed). - I've no experience with Compact Framework, but wonder whether, given the platform restrictions, it would be better served going forward by a separate code base with a simplified and restricted logging framework that exposes an identical API to applications. Doing this would make development easier, for example by allowing the use of generics and Linq. Which in turn might attract more developers ... One way to approach it would be to remove the binaries for these platforms from the next release, and only remove from the source code if a reasonable period elapses without too much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
