Re: [xml] Resuming maintenance

[Borden via xml]

12 Jan 2022, 10:24 by xml@gnome.org:
> Personally, I think the main problem is funding. The pool of competent 
> programmers willing to spend months of their time to work on a rather 
> outdated code base implementing mostly legacy technology for free is tiny or 
> even non-existent. It's really the large corporations who could make a 
> difference by sponsoring OSS maintenance directly. I'm sure you can find 
> people like me who would work on OSS at a discount, but not without any 
> monetary compensation.
>
> Nick
It's refreshing to have someone speak so honestly about the economics of open 
source development and the reality that, no, one just cannot fork the source 
code and rewrite it to do what they want.

As a money guy (as opposed to a programming guy), I've thought for years about 
how to crowdfund open source projects. I have an idea that, at least 
mathematically, works. But I don't have nearly enough knowledge about software 
and digital infrastructure to know whether it's feasible to implement or what 
would be involved.

If anyone's interested, I'm happy to talk about it off list. Waiting for 
corporate charity to help doesn't seem like a workable long-term solution.
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Re: [xml] Resuming maintenance

[Nick Wellnhofer via xml]

On 12/01/2022 17:30, Stefan de Konink wrote:
If you're seeing degraded performance on large documents, it's likely 
another issue with quadratic runtime. Fixing such issues algorithmically 
should typically yield much better results than trying to work around them 
with multi-threading.


What can I do to identify these thing in a usable way? Would a profiler help 
in this case?


Yes, profiling is usually the quickest way to see which part of the code is 
causing performance issues. Then you could try to isolate the problem and come 
up with a test case where doubling the input size results in quadrupling the 
execution time or shows other superlinear behavior.


Nick
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Re: [xml] Resuming maintenance

[David Kilzer via xml]

On Jan 12, 2022, at 7:24 AM, Nick Wellnhofer via xml  wrote:

> On 10/01/2022 20:47, Mike Dalessio wrote:
>> Although I'm relieved, the potential loss of maintainers from the project 
>>  was 
>> alarming. Perhaps another goal to consider for the year is to expand the 
>> pool of contributors and maintainers. I (and others, I assume) am interested 
>> in volunteering more time so that the burden isn't carried by you alone, and 
>> so that if in the future you're unable to secure funding the user community 
>> will be able to sustain that loss.
>> Thanks again, and please think about what work volunteers can pick up to get 
>> more involved.
> 
> Anyone is invited to help with maintenance. But I can't think of many simple 
> issues for people to get started. Fixing bugs and reviewing merge requests 
> often requires deep knowledge of the code base which in turn requires to 
> invest considerable amounts of time. On the other hand, everyone has to start 
> somewhere. The best way is probably to start working on interesting issues, 
> learn from any mistakes you make, and repeat.

Welcome back, Nick!  I plan to contribute by posting patches to upstream 
changes from Apple’s port of libxml2 and libxslt.  While I know enough about 
libxml2 and libxslt to fix some bugs, I am not in a place where I could be a 
maintainer.  (I also have limited time to spend on these projects based on 
assigned tasks at work.)

I also plan to link up CVE-IDs that Apple assigned to specific issues:
>

> Personally, I think the main problem is funding. The pool of competent 
> programmers willing to spend months of their time to work on a rather 
> outdated code base implementing mostly legacy technology for free is tiny or 
> even non-existent. It's really the large corporations who could make a 
> difference by sponsoring OSS maintenance directly. I'm sure you can find 
> people like me who would work on OSS at a discount, but not without any 
> monetary compensation.

When an official process is set up for funding libxml2/libxslt (per your 
original email), I’ll inquire about contributing to it at work.

Dave

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Re: [xml] Resuming maintenance

[Stefan de Konink]

Hi Nick,

On Wednesday, January 12, 2022 3:49:07 PM CET, Nick Wellnhofer wrote:
I didn't make any performance improvements to the XSD code 
personally. You're probably seeing improvements from the 
following commit which wasn't authored by me:


https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/commit/faea2fa9


Exactly.


If you're seeing degraded performance on large documents, it's 
likely another issue with quadratic runtime. Fixing such issues 
algorithmically should typically yield much better results than 
trying to work around them with multi-threading.


What can I do to identify these thing in a usable way? Would a profiler 
help in this case?


--
Stefan
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Re: [xml] Resuming maintenance

[Nick Wellnhofer via xml]

On 11/01/2022 11:38, Daniel Veillard wrote:

  So you want to reintegrate libxml2 within the GNOME framework ? TBH
now that I have very limited bandwidth that's probably the right thing
to do.


I didn't mean the GNOME desktop environment itself, but the infrastructure 
that the GNOME Foundation offers. Mostly the GitLab instance which could be 
used to create and distribute releases and the GitLab Wiki which could be used 
for documentation.


It seems like a historical accident that libxml2 ended up under the GNOME 
umbrella, but why shouldn't we use the features we are offered? It certainly 
makes collaboration easier than maintaining your own website. It's also nice 
to have a self-hosted platform compared to something like GitHub.



  Happy to help you any steps you may need to take over,


For now, it's enough to receive some formal blessing from you to start making 
releases on my own.


Nick
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Re: [xml] Resuming maintenance

[Nick Wellnhofer via xml]

On 10/01/2022 20:47, Mike Dalessio wrote:
Although I'm relieved, the potential loss of maintainers from the project 
 was 
alarming. Perhaps another goal to consider for the year is to expand the pool 
of contributors and maintainers. I (and others, I assume) am interested in 
volunteering more time so that the burden isn't carried by you alone, and so 
that if in the future you're unable to secure funding the user community will 
be able to sustain that loss.


Thanks again, and please think about what work volunteers can pick up to get 
more involved.


Anyone is invited to help with maintenance. But I can't think of many simple 
issues for people to get started. Fixing bugs and reviewing merge requests 
often requires deep knowledge of the code base which in turn requires to 
invest considerable amounts of time. On the other hand, everyone has to start 
somewhere. The best way is probably to start working on interesting issues, 
learn from any mistakes you make, and repeat.


Personally, I think the main problem is funding. The pool of competent 
programmers willing to spend months of their time to work on a rather outdated 
code base implementing mostly legacy technology for free is tiny or even 
non-existent. It's really the large corporations who could make a difference 
by sponsoring OSS maintenance directly. I'm sure you can find people like me 
who would work on OSS at a discount, but not without any monetary compensation.


Nick
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Re: [xml] Resuming maintenance

[Nick Wellnhofer via xml]

On 10/01/2022 16:51, Stefan de Konink wrote:
This is great news, thanks Google for acknowledging the importance of 
maintaining core open source products. Your previous improvements on XSD 
validation made a great difference, but from my prototype in Python (LXML) I 
assume that multithreaded constraint validation and a more efficient way of 
storage would gain additional performance on files larger than 500MB. One may 
ask if no 'green fund' would be able to donate money on these type of 
improvements.


I didn't make any performance improvements to the XSD code personally. You're 
probably seeing improvements from the following commit which wasn't authored 
by me:


https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/commit/faea2fa9

If you're seeing degraded performance on large documents, it's likely another 
issue with quadratic runtime. Fixing such issues algorithmically should 
typically yield much better results than trying to work around them with 
multi-threading.


Nick
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Re: [xml] Resuming maintenance

[Daniel Veillard via xml]

On Mon, Jan 10, 2022 at 03:20:09PM +0100, Nick Wellnhofer via xml wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Thanks to a donation from Google, I'm able to resume maintenance of libxml2
> (and libxslt) for the remainder of 2022.

  Yay !  :-)

> My immediate plans are:
> 
> - Make a bug fix release fixing many regressions.
> - Establish a new release schedule, possibly with multiple branches being
>   maintained.
> - Move releases from the old FTP server to GNOME's Gitlab infrastructure.
> - Move documentation to GNOME infrastructure.
> - Set up an official way to sponsor libxml2 maintainers.

 So you want to reintegrate libxml2 within the GNOME framework ? TBH
now that I have very limited bandwidth that's probably the right thing
to do.
 Happy to help you any steps you may need to take over,

   thanks,

Daniel

> In the future I'll focus less on security improvements and more on typical
> maintenance duties like bug fixes and modernizing the code base in a few
> ways.
> 
> Thanks (again) to Google for making this possible.
> 
> Nick
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-- 
Daniel Veillard  | Red Hat Developers Tools http://developer.redhat.com/
veill...@redhat.com  | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | virtualization library  http://libvirt.org/

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Re: [xml] Resuming maintenance

[Stefan Behnel]

Nick Wellnhofer via xml schrieb am 10.01.22 um 15:20:
Thanks to a donation from Google, I'm able to resume maintenance of libxml2 
(and libxslt) for the remainder of 2022.


I'm very happy to read this, Nick. All the best for 2022.

Stefan
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Re: [xml] Resuming maintenance

[Mike Dalessio via xml]

I'm so happy to hear that you'll be able to spend time on libxml2 this
year, Nick. Thank you and thanks to Google.

Although I'm relieved, the potential loss of maintainers from the project
 was
alarming. Perhaps another goal to consider for the year is to expand the
pool of contributors and maintainers. I (and others, I assume) am
interested in volunteering more time so that the burden isn't carried by
you alone, and so that if in the future you're unable to secure funding the
user community will be able to sustain that loss.

Thanks again, and please think about what work volunteers can pick up to
get more involved.

On Mon, Jan 10, 2022 at 9:20 AM Nick Wellnhofer via xml 
wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Thanks to a donation from Google, I'm able to resume maintenance of
> libxml2
> (and libxslt) for the remainder of 2022.
>
> My immediate plans are:
>
> - Make a bug fix release fixing many regressions.
> - Establish a new release schedule, possibly with multiple branches being
>maintained.
> - Move releases from the old FTP server to GNOME's Gitlab infrastructure.
> - Move documentation to GNOME infrastructure.
> - Set up an official way to sponsor libxml2 maintainers.
>
> In the future I'll focus less on security improvements and more on typical
> maintenance duties like bug fixes and modernizing the code base in a few
> ways.
>
> Thanks (again) to Google for making this possible.
>
> Nick
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>
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Re: [xml] Resuming maintenance

[Stefan de Konink]

Dear Nick,

This is great news, thanks Google for acknowledging the importance of 
maintaining core open source products. Your previous improvements on XSD 
validation made a great difference, but from my prototype in Python (LXML) 
I assume that multithreaded constraint validation and a more efficient way 
of storage would gain additional performance on files larger than 500MB. 
One may ask if no 'green fund' would be able to donate money on these type 
of improvements.


--
Stefan
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