[jbosstools-dev] FreeMarker plugin deprecation

[Daniel Dekany]

Wednesday, March 7, 2018, 5:46:34 PM, Mickael Istria wrote:

> 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.

I think you can just sign the Software Grant and Corporate Contributor
License Agreement, make a PR on Github on the ASF repository prepared
for the purpose, and the Apache FreeMarker committers will do the rest
(replacing license headers, renaming packages, getting rid of improper
dependencies, etc.). Now that's not an official statement from ASF,
but I can ask ASF legal if needed.

> 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

(Apache, surely not Eclipse in this concrete case. FreeMarker is owned
by Apache.)

> 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.

-- 
Thanks,
 Daniel Dekany