HBase Quarterly report Jan-Mar 2021

[Duo Zhang <zh...@apache.org>]

Hi all,

HBase submits a report to the ASF board once a quarter, to inform the board
about project health. I'm sending the report to the user@ and dev@ mailing
lists because you are the project, and for transparency. If you have any
questions about the report or the running of the project, you can post them
to any PMC member or committer, or send an email to private@hbase.apache.org
,
which every PMC member subscribes to.

## Description:
Apache HBase is an open-source, distributed, versioned, non-relational
database. Apache HBase gives you low latency random access to billions of
rows
with millions of columns atop non-specialized hardware.

hbase-thirdparty is a set of internal artifacts used by the project to
mitigate the impact of our dependency choices on the wider ecosystem.

hbase-connectors is a collection of integration points with other projects.
The initial release includes artifacts for use with Apache Kafka and Apache
Spark.

hbase-filesystem contains HBase project-specific implementations of the
Apache
Hadoop FileSystem API. It is currently experimental and internal to the
project.

hbase-operator-tools is a collection of tools for HBase operators. Now it is
mainly for hosting HBCK2.

hbase-native-client is a client library in C/C++, in its early days.

## Issues:
There are no issues requiring board attention.

## Membership Data:
Apache HBase was founded 2010-04-21 (11 years ago)
There are currently 93 committers and 55 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 3:2.

Community changes, past quarter:
- Huaxiang Sun was added to the PMC on 2021-04-12
- Geoffrey Jacoby was added as committer on 2021-04-09

## Project Activity:
Recent releases:
2.3.5 was released on 2021-03-31.
2.4.2 was released on 2021-03-17.
hbase-operator-tools-1.1.0 was released on 2021-02-20.
hbase-thirdparty-3.5.0 was released on 2021-02-20.
2.4.1 was released on 2021-01-26.
2.3.4 was released on 2021-01-22.

We discussed again on whether to EOL all 1.x, as There doesn't seem to be
much
developer interest in branch-1 beyond occasional maintenance. Reid Chan
offered to complete the 1.7.0 release.
https://s.apache.org/u3q4t

We restarted the splittable meta design, and held an online meeting again to
discuss.
https://s.apache.org/i5mwy

We discussed whether to move the stable pointer to 2.4.x. This is a good
sign
that the 2.x releases are more and more stable.
https://s.apache.org/z1iaq

The volunteer on maintaining hbase-backup had shown up and put up a design
discussion about the feature.
https://s.apache.org/ora3e

We found that it is a bit pain for keeping JIRA issue and git commit in sync
and what's more, we include CHANGES and RELEASENOTES directly in a release
so
it will be easy to sink an RC if we found something wrong in these two
files,
not the actual code. We discussed how to make RMs live better in the future.
https://s.apache.org/2nxzw

The first phase of moving our tracing system from HTrace to OpenTelemetry
has
been done. We will start a vote soon to merge the feature branch back.
https://s.apache.org/9eekz

We finally migrated the legacy log4j1 logging system to log4j2. We also
reached out to the hadoop community to see if they would like to migrate
too.
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-19577
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-16206

## Community Health:
- Mailing list activity:
dev@hbase.apache.org:
958 subscribers(985 in the previous quarter)
769 emails sent to list(1014 in the previous quarter)

user@hbase.apache.org:
2035 subscribers(2080 in the previous quarter)
91 emails sent to list(85 in the previous quarter)

user-zh@hbase.apache.org
71 subscribers(71 in the previous quarter)
1 emails sent to list(35 in the previous quarter)

- JIRA activity:
261 issues opened in JIRA, past quarter (-16% decrease)
243 issues closed in JIRA, past quarter (-1% decrease)

- Commit activity:
902 commits in the past quarter (3% increase)
67 code contributors in the past quarter (-9% decrease)

- GitHub PR activity:
281 PRs opened on GitHub, past quarter (-21% decrease)
309 PRs closed on GitHub, past quarter (-8% decrease)

The community is still healthy but the development activity keeps
decreasing. We need to speed up the release process of the new major
release,
i.e, we need to have a list of features we want to include in the new major
release and start to make progress.