Roger,
My rant about the declining state of the FOSS ecosystem and Apache
projects may have been better directed at Apache itself. I've seen a few
projects get shuffled over to Apache as if they were meant to die. It
would be ideal if Apache, besides a hosting space, also provided some
other kind of support to people who maintain their projects. Depending
on the generosity of companies where situations align with business
goals becomes analogous to winning on a scratch off lottery ticket.
Yeah, five bucks...
FWIW, "The Cathedral and The
Bazaar"(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar) is a
reference to a book written by an early supporter of FOSS. Not to gate
keep, but grey hairs may be involved to know that reference. To see the
FOSS ecosystem reduced to "who will pay for supporting it" is disappointing.
But these are all big-picture problems.
Yup, XML and transformations isn't "sexy". It doesn't get media buzz. It
quietly does its job in the background and we all move along none the wiser.
If it seemed that my rant was personal, please know that it isn't.
You've been toiling away getting things done probably without praise or
other accolades. I appreciate your efforts.
Regards,
Scott
On 2022-10-19 15:03, Roger Leigh wrote:
Hi Scott,
We can all “hope” for maintenance but ultimately someone needs to
commit to doing the work. That needs paying for, be it in time
donated or money to pay for someone else to do it. In my previous job
I maintained an application which was critically dependent upon
Xerces-C/Xalan-C, and when we found deficiencies and faults in it, in
particular portability defects, my employer graciously permitted me to
work on both codebases and provide the necessary fixes, including
signing off the Corporate CLA. So the cost for me to contribute to
these projects was ultimately paid for by my employer, because it
benefitted them to have supported libraries that worked on all of the
platforms and compiler versions we cared about, plus any needed
security fixes being applied. After leaving that position, I
continued to contribute, but at this point in time I’m no longer
actively involved in working on codebases which use either Xerces-C or
Xalan-C, and in fact I was contracted to replace their use with other
libraries by one of my end users (which is reflective of people’s
concern over the risk of using abandoned and unsupported libraries).
So while altruism can go some way, I’m afraid my time is limited and I
work on other projects from which I derive more benefit. I’m afraid
to say that continuing to work on both projects costs me a great deal
of time, for which I derive zero personal benefit, which is why it is
time for me to cease participating in these projects and to work on
others.
None of this is “right” or “wrong”, it’s just the reality of where the
project is at this point in its life. All software projects have a
lifecycle, a beginning when they are actively developed, a plateau
during which they are maintained and stable and an end when they are
wound down. Xalan-C is at the end. Xerces-C isn’t far behind.
One of the reasons for moving Xalan-C to the Attic is to make the true
maintenance status of the project abundantly clear to everyone using
it and distributing it. Including provoking discussions such as this
one—it’s important that everyone understands the consequences of the
change in status (even if that status is what was effectively the
status quo for the best part of a decade). If the result of the
discussion is that we end up with some new maintainers who make a
genuine commitment to carrying the project forward, then I would be
more than happy. If there are businesses or individuals who are
dependent upon it for the continuation of their products and business
continuity, then perhaps this discussion will prompt some
consideration of whether or not they need to contribute actively to
keep the project going.
However, while it would be nice to hope for such actions, I’m afraid
as I said in my original email on the subject, that overall interest
in XML and XSLT is waning, and there is much less demand for libraries
and tools for performing XSLT transforms. So the lack of interest in
Xalan is not unique. It also applies to libxslt, and it also applies
to QtXmlPatterns. Look at
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxslt/-/merge_requests?scope=all&state=merged
<https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxslt/-/merge_requests?scope=all&state=merged>
to see how active libxslt is—it’s primarily sporadic churn to fix the
CI and some minor portability issues and one or two bugfixes; there’s
no actual development going on there either. Basically what I was
doing with Xalan-C for the 1.12 release. QtXmlPatterns has been
dropped entirely. To be frank, if a company really needs to use XSLT,
then paying for Saxon is probably the best choice—you’ll be paying for
having a library which is actually maintained and which also has the
best XSLT support of all of the XSLT libraries available. If you are
basing your business on this, then there isn’t really much of a choice
to make here, the answer is obvious.
I’m not sure I really buy the point about the cathedral and the
bazaar. Xerces-C and Xalan-C benefitted from huge contributions from
corporations, IBM in particular. I could be wrong (I came in much
later), but it looks like the vast majority of all of the development
of these projects was done by developers working for IBM. I’m not
sure that the projects ever had many significant contributions outside
this effort from independent individual contributors for anything more
substantial than small fixes. Individual volunteers generally want to
work on interesting and fun stuff. Working on Xerces-C and Xalan-C
has been little more than hour after hour of boring maintenance work.
Hundreds of man-hours keeping the CI going, testing the build system
on multiple platforms, debugging and testing, reviewing, testing and
applying patches applied to the various Linux and other distributions,
plus GitHub PRs. Necessary, but not particularly fun or rewarding,
and extremely time consuming. But the project needs someone to be
doing this on an ongoing basis as a basic prerequisite to be able to
test changes and make releases, and generally provide the basic
infrastructure one would expect from a healthy and active project as a
viable ongoing concern.
There’s a limit to what an individual can do. I used to work a
full-time job and then spend another 6-8 hours every day writing free
software and being a Debian developer, with a lot of unwritten
obligations to satisfy. That worked until I hit my 30s and I ended up
with crippling RSI and massively burnt out. Today in my 40s I work my
day job and tinker with some free software stuff on the side. Making
a commitment to work on a project like Xalan-C or Xerces-C brings with
it ongoing obligations to do a lot of work on an ongoing basis and in
a timely manner. I can’t continue to do that. Everyone using Xalan-C
today has benefitted from the work I’ve done, without needing to
contribute anything back. If users of Xalan-C want the project to
continue, then they will need to step up to do all this stuff themselves.
Regards,
Roger
*From:* Scott Furry <scott.wl.fu...@gmail.com>
*Sent:* 19 October 2022 08:13
*To:* c-users@xalan.apache.org; d...@xalan.apache.org
*Subject:* Re: [VOTE] Moving Xalan-C to the Attic
I'm only an occasional user of Xerces-C/Xalan-C libraries but
retirement seems wrong to me. Understandable. Lamentable. Still wrong.
Reading the suggestion of placing Xalan-C into 'the attic', I dove
online to plan a migration strategy should it become necessary. I was
not pleased with what I found:
- Saxon has a `community edition` but is only interested in selling
licenses.
- Folks over at libxml2/libxslt go to great lengths to stipulate that
Gnome is not required - but library has its 'C' quirks. C++ wrappers
of various type and quality abound.
The previous move by Oracle to 'abandoned' the Netbeans IDE to the
Apache Foundation was not pleasant for me. After seven release
iterations the IDE still doesn't have a decent C/C++ setup comparable
to the Netbeans 8.2 plugin. Everyone in the Apache Netbeans project
seems focused on Java. I have an overall negative impression of Apache
projects as a result.
I can appreciate that few have the time and resources to commit to
maintain code. We've gone from "The Cathedral and The Bazaar" to silos
("Big Box Stores") of companies - Ubuntu, Gnome, Red Hat, et al. The
notion of the dedicated developer toiling away doing incredible work
in obscurity is becoming quaint. XKCD pretty much nailed it with the
'Dependency' comic (https://xkcd.com/2347/).
Given the long history of the Xerces-C/Xalan-C, as well as few decent
compatible replacements, I would hope the code could be maintained in
the future.
