Stian, is an "incubator release ... to verify that the Intellectual Property is clean" the same thing as the "token release" that lets Taverna graduate?
Gale On Thu, Sep 5, 2019, 2:27 AM Stian Soiland-Reyes < [email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > It saddens me, but we have to discuss the reality. > > Taverna have progressed well in the incubator, if slowly. > > But I think you will agree with me that the activity level has dropped > to a minimum during the last year. > > Note that it is perfectly OK for an Apache project to not be in active > development. If you go through the ASF list you will find several mature > projects in that state. > > > We said we would release the remaining code bases (e.g. taverna-mobile, > taverna-workbench), which beyond "re-engate PPMC" is the only remaining > hurdle before we can graduate. > > > While we had some starts at this, we did not go through with it. > > What distinguishes a "dead" project from a "sleeping" project at ASF > will be the ability to prepare, vote and publish releases. This requires > a PPMC that is engaged, and volunteer release managers. > > > Now I think we still have enough PPMC folks to do the vote (let's see > how many engages in this thread). > > What we don't seem to have is enough energy/time to prepare and publish > releases. I am as guilty as anyone - I had promised to prepare several > release candidates for a vote, but dropped the ball. > > I will admit that preparing release candidates at ASF does take a bit > more effort than a quick "git tag" - although we mostly have our > instructions and Maven tooling now set up to do it fairly easy. > > > As I pointed out in the September report - given the lack of progress I > think we need to seriously discuss the possibility of > retiring Taverna from the incubator. > > > There is no shame in this - we've had a good run and done lots of > progress - which could live on in a more lightweight fashion, e.g. a > GitHub organization. Recently even an active podling retired from the > incubator to do this, (although that was over political differences). > > Retiring means giving up on the Apache name and *.apache.org resources. > We could simply change the name back to just "Taverna" and keep it under > the Apache License. Practically the package name and Maven coordinates > would need to change, as we did for modules we moved to taverna-extra > GitHub group earlier. > > > One alternative we have discussed before: shrink the size of Taverna > code-base so it's largely what we have already done releases for. We > could drop taverna-workbench-* and some plugins. > > If we then just do a "token" release to show we are still alive then we > would be able to crawl into a graduation proposal. > > > After graduation to an ASF project we would need to do board reports and > any PMC-level management (typically respond to email requests), but ASF > board is not interferring in how often releases are done etc. > > Given that taverna-mobile is freshly started in the incubator with ASF > copyright it would admitedly be a shame to "leave it behind" graduation, > but it could be possible to bring it back later. The easiest would > however be to do a incubator release of this now to verify that > the Intellectual Property is clean. > > > What are your views on the future directions of the Taverna project? > Please feel free to contribute, however small comment. > > -- > Stian Soiland-Reyes > https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9842-9718 > >
