Hi folks,
I'm not sure if this is the most appropriate list, but I'm not sure
exactly how to proceed, so if it's wrong please redirect me to where I
should go.
I'm a user of Apache Xerces-C++ and Xalan-C++. Both of these projects
haven't seen much maintenance for the last few years, and I was having
severe problems building them on modern platforms because of the
outdated and broken build systems these projects used. It wasn't
possible to build either on Windows without extensive patching of the
Visual Studio Project/Solution files, and similar for brokenness in the
GNU Autoconf/Automake builds, which imposed a significant maintenance
burden upon myself and other users of these projects.
To fix this, I joined the Apache project and contributed a CMake build
plus fixes to the Autoconf/Automake build to the Apache Xerces-C++
project on behalf of my employer. There was quite a bit of interest in
this from other users suffering from the same problems, and the active
developer on the project was welcoming of the patches. This was
eventually released as Xerces-C++ 3.2.0 last year, with a 3.2.1 due
imminently with some bugfixes for this work.
Unfortunately, I have not have the same success with the Xalan-C
project. Over the last two years, I have opened several tickets with
tested patches, made several posts to the mailing lists regarding the
same, and received zero responses.
Tickets:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/XALANC-773
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/XALANC-766
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/XALANC-767
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/XALANC-776
Posts:
https://marc.info/?l=xalan-dev&m=149748238016328&w=2
https://marc.info/?l=xalan-dev&m=150228668631916&w=2
https://marc.info/?l=xalan-dev&m=150618078013560&w=2
It's a bit of a black hole. Looking at the SVN repository:
Last release was 1.11: on Oct 31 2012 (5 years, 4 months)
Last development commit: Sep 25 2013 (4 years, 5 months)
There is zero visible activity there for a long, long time.
There have been a small number of messages from the maintainer to the
mailing list, but no actual work appears to be taking place, and without
any replies to my tickets or posts, I'm a bit stuck. I do need to get
the longstanding portability bugs fixed so that I can continue to use it
on contemporary systems without it requiring man weeks of effort
maintaining out of tree patches which require redoing from scratch for
every new version of Visual Studio. Even with hand-patching I'm still
seeing subtle misbehaviour at link time and runtime on various
platforms; what's there simply isn't fit for purpose and the current
situation is not tenable for us as end users.
Is there any process within the Apache project for handling dead
projects (assuming this is the case). I don't want to take over the
project, I just want to submit a bunch of fixes so that we can make a
new point release which actually works without extensive patching. I've
been waiting over two years for a single reply to any of my attempts at
contact, and my patience has its limits, which is why I'm writing here
to see if there's any way to make some actionable progress.
Many thanks,
Roger Leigh
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