Re: Bringing the Annotator Toolkit to Apache

[Robert Knight <ro...@hypothes.is>]

Hi Randall,

I’m happy for approx-string-match-js to be imported into the project if it helps other libraries in the project make use of it. As a general-purpose approximate string matching library it isn’t tied to the use case of annotation as much as the other libraries are though, and I’d like to retain the ability for interested parties to easily find / use it outside of that context. For that reason I think it would make sense for it to have a separate version number, where changes in the number reflect the semver impact on that particular library.

Kind Regards,
Rob.

> On 23 Jun 2019, at 01:15, Randall Leeds <ra...@apache.org> wrote:
> 
> I'd like to consider migrating some of the libraries that make up the "Annotator Toolkit", so to speak, into the Apache Annotator project. For this, I am requested some help from our mentors, the permission of the rest of the PPMC and the library authors, and feedback from the community on this list.
> 
> Some of the libraries were mentioned in the initial project proposal [1] while others have been developed since [2][3]. The primary authors of these libraries are myself, Gerben (PPMC member, CC'd, @Treora on GitHub) and Robert (CC'd, likely subscribed, @robertknight on GitHub).
> 
> This e-mail is broken into three parts:
> 
> 1. Questions for Library Authors
> 2. Licensing Questions
> 3. Thoughts on Packaging
> 
> Questions for Library Authors
> 
> Gerben, would you be interested in bringing dom-highlight-range into the project? We have an open issue [4] to build a highlighter. Benjamin and I discussed at I Annotate that it would be immensely valuable for users to have even a simple implementation. Your project is already a dependency of the Apache Annotator demo, and its LICENSE [5] credits dom-anchor-text-position.
> 
> Robert, would you be interested in bringing approx-string-match-js into the project? The recent thread convinced me that there's a strong likelihood that it could be leveraged by the selector framework that is starting to take shape here.
> 
> For my part, I'm interested in bringing dom-node-iterator [6] and dom-seek [7] into the project, both of which are now being used as dependencies. These were both mentioned in the proposal [1], the latter under the name "node-iterator-shim". I am the sole author of both of these.
> 
> Additionally, I may be interested in bringing dom-anchor-text-position [8] into the project. It also contains an implementation of Range.prototype.toString that I would like to be using.
> 
> Licensing Questions
> 
> For the mentors and anyone else familiar with Apache licensing requirements, I would like to understand what steps are needed to import code to an incubating project correctly.
> 
> For do-node-iterator and dom-seek, I am the sole author. It's possible I could just commit this directly without any other process, but I would like some advice first as to whether I need to formalize any copyright assignment.
> 
> In the case of dom-highlight-range, Gerben is the sole author. Whatever applies to the previous two libraries applies equally here, as Gerben is a PPMC member.
> 
> For approx-string-match-js, Robert is the sole author. For dom-anchor-text-position, I am the primary author and Robert has a non-trivial contributions. The only other contribution was a small correction to the README by Arun Prasad (https://github.com/akprasad <https://github.com/akprasad>). Assuming Robert responds positively to bringing one or both of these projects into Apache Annotator, I would like advise on what other steps we would need to take to do that correctly.
> 
> Thoughts on Packaging
> 
> The repository is set up for bumping package version numbers in lockstep. However, since all of these packages are published on npm, I probably want to change the Lerna setup to make them independently versioned. It might make sense to continue publishing some libraries under their original names. We would still bundle and release these as part of separately-versioned Apache Annotator releases, the first of which is a topic I will raise in a separate thread shortly.
> 
> Regards,
> Randall
> 
> [1]: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ANNO/Annotator+Proposal <https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ANNO/Annotator+Proposal>
> [2]: https://github.com/Treora/dom-highlight-range <https://github.com/Treora/dom-highlight-range>
> [3]: https://github.com/robertknight/approx-string-match-js <https://github.com/robertknight/approx-string-match-js>
> [4]: https://github.com/apache/incubator-annotator/issues/22 <https://github.com/apache/incubator-annotator/issues/22>
> [5]: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Treora/dom-highlight-range/master/LICENCE <https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Treora/dom-highlight-range/master/LICENCE>
> [6]: https://github.com/tilgovi/dom-seek <https://github.com/tilgovi/dom-seek>
> [7]: https://github.com/tilgovi/dom-node-iterator <https://github.com/tilgovi/dom-node-iterator>
> [8]: https://github.com/tilgovi/dom-anchor-text-position <https://github.com/tilgovi/dom-anchor-text-position>