[jbosstools-dev] FreeMarker plugin deprecation

[Mickael Istria]

Hi,

On Wed, Mar 7, 2018 at 5:16 PM, Max Rydahl Andersen <manderse at redhat.com>
wrote:

> just want to raise that we don't need to move to apache - we can make
> anyone a contributor
> on the jboss tools freemarker plugin that agreeds to the jboss CLA.
>
This situation is deeply confusing for JBoss Tools maintainers and
potential contributors and your proposal wouldn't help: we -as Red Hat
employees- ha've been asked to drop maintenance of jbosstools-freemarker
for business or strategical reasons, but we keep it under jbosstools (~=
Red Hat) organization. This gives the impression to contributors that we're
still owning and maintaining this code. If we want to open this repo to new
contributors, incoming contributors would expect us to review PRs, maintain
builds and all that stuff we're exactly supposed to not do any more while
we stop maintaining. Moreover, some contributors may not like contributing
to JBoss or Red Hat branded projects because it's not a vendor-neutral
ecosystem.
Keeping things like it isn't profitable to anyone and we generally need to
clarify what we mean by "not maintained" and how to properly "give up"
components like this. We're currently in a mid-ground that's blocking all
possible progress or decision.

The big question in that case is whether we (Red Hat) is ready to make the
effort to "give" such almost abandoned code to Eclipse or Apache Foundation
(this involves effort to rebrand package and artifacts, make standalone
build, move code...)? That's something we need to clarify before moving any
further.
If the answer is that Red Hat isn't willing to make that migration effort
but wouldn't mind anyone else doing it and would approve it legally, let's
just write it down very clearly in the README and remove everything else
that's not relevant any more. And we can make a statement to Apache or
Eclipse that we approve someone else moving this code.
If the answer is that Red Hat can support with manpower migration of this
code to someplace else, then it needs to be made more official before
people can work on this instead of other stuff. But if we do that, it also
means we need to make clear that we're moving the code to better abandon it
and let other owns it immediately, as there is no more reason to maintain
it at Apache/Eclipse than in jbosstools-freemarker repo.

@Max: I really believe we need a hierarchical decision here, it's not a 5
minutes task, and leaving it on GitHub like this can be perceived as
technical debt because we still get users reaching us with questions.
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