Since it's going to take the board a little bit to publish, attached
inline is the report I submitted for this quarter.
The feedback was all positive and appreciative of our willingness to
remain constructive.
Thanks again folks! It's the participation like we've had recently
that will keep moving us forward.
-Nate
--------
Attachment G: Report from the Apache Cassandra Project [Nate McCall]
## Description:
The past couple of months have been difficult for us. For posterity, the
August [0] and September[1] board agendas provide details of changes
affecting the project and subsequent PMC efforts to address board requested
action items. We will continue to work constructively with the board on the
points therein.
With that said, we would like to express not only our optimism (more below)
but our thanks to those within the ASF who have spent substantial amounts of
time to help us get moving in the right direction. Of particular note have
been the ongoing efforts Mark Thomas and Jake Farrell. Without them, it would
have been much more difficult to deduce what to do next and how to go about
doing it. For everyone else, a large thank you as well. If nothing else, it's
clear we all care very deeply about having successful open source software
projects.
## Issues:
A long-time vendor who has been a large benefactor of the project through
contribution of resources, has re-focused said resources to more internal
efforts[2]. While many of their staff are still involved in day-to-day
activities, it has left something of a hole for the PMC to fill in terms of
handling day-to-day resourcing of issues.
Discussions are ongoing on how best to do this, but we remain optimistic that
the size, diversity and skill of the community are enough that we will find
solutions.
## Release Activity:
Apache Cassandra has had the following releases:
- 2.1.16 was released on Mon Oct 10 2016
- 2.2.8 was released on Wed Sep 28 2016
- 3.8 was released on Thu Sep 29 2016
- 3.9 was released on Thu Sep 29 2016
We have recently moved trunk up to 4.0 and are currently discussing a roadmap
for such on the development mailing list.
Note: 3.10 and 3.0.10 were scheduled to be released, but were voted down due
to a regression bug discovered by the community.
## Health report:
>From the past several weeks of mailing list and social media activity, one
can draw the following conclusions regarding the health of Cassandra:
- our large, diverse community of users care deeply about the project and are
not afraid to very publicly ask hard questions
- the board cares deeply about our project as can be seen by amount of effort
expended in handling not only Cassandra but the larger issues brought about
by the point above
- the PMC wants very much to do the right thing and is doing its best to
constructively move forward
In short, we do not lack for passion at any level of the project. It is
therefore our game to lose and we intend to put our best efforts in over the
next quarter.
## PMC changes:
- Currently 21 PMC members.
- There are two new PMC members:
- Sankalp Kohli was added to the PMC on Mon Oct 24 2016
- Michael Shuler was added to the PMC on Thu Sep 22 2016
## Committer base changes:
- Currently 38 committers.
- There are three new commmitters:
- Dikang Gu was added as a committer on Fri Nov 04 2016
- Sankalp Kohli was added as a committer on Tue Oct 25 2016
- Branimir Lambov was voted in and accepted, we are awaiting ICLA
submission
## Mailing list activity:
Activity on both dev and user mail lists have increased substantially over
last quarter. We have no direct quantitative information as to why, but
anecdotally it appears that we have knowledgeable users appearing more
often to answer other users's questions.
- dev@cassandra.apache.org:
- 1582 subscribers (down -3 in the last 3 months):
- 709 emails sent to list (452 in previous quarter)
- Though not as high and some is resulting to larger political
discussions, we still have over 60% growth in traffic.
- u...@cassandra.apache.org:
- 3109 subscribers (down -6 in the last 3 months):
- 1597 emails sent to list (901 in previous quarter)
- Mail list activity has increased over 50% from the last quarter.
## JIRA activity:
As discussed above in Issues we would like the number of resolved issues
to be higher, but over 75% is not a bad place to be and we are actively
working on getting more community involvement.
- 480 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months
- 372 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months
## Trademark Enforcement
Three requests were sent out regarding our trademarks, all of which were
immediately complied with by the recipients:
- Clarified appropriate use of trademark and guidelines for a third party
vendor providing backports of Apache Cassandra patches to a custom long
term release version [3]
- Use of trademark in project name [4]
- Use of trademark in project name [5]
## 'dtest' Project Contribution
DataStax recently offered to donate the dtest distributed testing suite to
the project [6],[7]. This was voted on in the dev mailing list and passed
[8]. Filing the appropriate forms with the Incubator folks for review will be
done shortly.
## References
[0]
https://www.apache.org/foundation/records/minutes/2016/board_minutes_2016_08_17.txt
[1]
https://www.apache.org/foundation/records/minutes/2016/board_minutes_2016_09_21.txt
[2] http://www.datastax.com/2016/11/serving-customers-serving-the-community
[3]
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/69d87a0d59a23a4ee7578563785581d5daa5cb248987d67a70c44b86@%3Cprivate.cassandra.apache.org%3E
[4]
https://lists.apache.org/list.html?priv...@cassandra.apache.org:lte=1M:Apache%20trademark%20and%20Spring%20project%20names
[5] https://mesosphere.github.io/cassandra-mesos/
[6] https://github.com/riptano/cassandra-dtest
[7]
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/d43300016d3871587c43eea8cd4223221904fddc7916d9d6d858bd29@%3Cprivate.cassandra.apache.org%3E
[8]
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/d9e694ba8eaac8e8c70cbfd3f6ee249d43f8c67279882ffc65e56cac@%3Cdev.cassandra.apache.org%3E
