Hi Jeremias, As you point out, Sanselan hasn't drawn new contributors.
I've been thinking over the question of how to get more people involved in the Sanselan project for more than a year. The primary obstacle seems to be that most people are interested in a very narrow subset of image formats (jpg, gif, png, tiff) which Sanselan already supports fairly well. These formats are very static - revisions to or new versions of the formats simply don't happen. Almost all of the commonly used features of these formats are well-supported. In short, there's very little work to be done unless we change the scope of the project. Improving support for reading and writing EXIF/IPTC data in jpeg images addressed one of these key missing areas. There are a list of things I personally would like to do on the project (more control over how images are written, better documentation), but these are not projects that have or are likely to attract new members to the project. Other outstanding feature requests are either problematic or very difficult. Reading and/or writing JPEG image data is a huge project, which imho is already well served by alternatives to Sanselan (unless we simply wrap ImageIO). Adding support for JBIG2 would be great, but it would be a large project and so far, no one has volunteered to do it. And so I don't expect there to be projects that are likely to attract new contributors in the near future. This seems like a fatal problem, as Apache measures the health of a project by the activity and size of its community. Charles Matthew Chen On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 11:51 AM, Jeremias Maerki <[email protected]> wrote: > Deadline is up for submitting the report so I've just posted my draft > report. If anyone has to change anything, please do so here: > http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/incubator/sanselan/board/2009-01.txt?view=markup > and here: > http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/January2009 > (provided that one has not already been sent to the board in the > meantime). > > Anyway, it doesn't look good for Sanselan if not more people get active. > > > Jeremias Maerki > >
