State of the project

[Patricia Shanahan <pa...@acm.org>]

The next River report to the board is due May 11th. I am supposed to 
keep the board informed of the state of the community. With that in 
mind, I would welcome input from anyone with an opinion on the matter.

Re: State of the project

[Tom Hobbs <tv...@googlemail.com>]

I’d sum it up by saying that the project is on life support - but it could pull through.

There’s still a release in the pipeline, which hopefully we can get out pretty soon.  From that point I think we should revisit carrying on as-is, introducing some radical breaking changes or the attic.



> On 2 May 2016, at 11:33, Peter <ji...@zeus.net.au> wrote:
> 
> On 2/05/2016 8:59 AM, Patricia Shanahan wrote:
>> The next River report to the board is due May 11th. I am supposed to keep the board informed of the state of the community. With that in mind, I would welcome input from anyone with an opinion on the matter.
> 
> Well it's not looking too healthy, although it appears we still have enough pmc members to vote (4 active), we've lost a committer recently, interest in the project is tapering off.
> 
> Most of the code in River is aged between 12 and 18 years old, while the architectural design principles employed are sound, parts of the api are showing their age.
> 
> River is tied to Java and is currently deployed in server back end, private networks.  There may be some hope in IoT, however at present we don't support Android and have limited scope outside of Java.  River is also tied to Java serialization, which has fallen out of favour for newer protocols in recent times.
> 
> Although some steps have been made toward modularising River, the monolothic build is hampering development efforts:
> Modules allow a development campaign to focus on one module, allowing earlier completion, followed by review and release of an updated module.  The large monolothic codebase, prolongs a campain, (eg fixing race conditions) and makes it difficult for other developers to keep up with changes, resulting in generation of our own FUD and makes it difficult to release often.
> 
> On the plus side our suite of tests are quite comprehensive.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Peter.
> 

Re: State of the project

[Peter <ji...@zeus.net.au>]

On 2/05/2016 8:59 AM, Patricia Shanahan wrote:
> The next River report to the board is due May 11th. I am supposed to 
> keep the board informed of the state of the community. With that in 
> mind, I would welcome input from anyone with an opinion on the matter.

Well it's not looking too healthy, although it appears we still have 
enough pmc members to vote (4 active), we've lost a committer recently, 
interest in the project is tapering off.

Most of the code in River is aged between 12 and 18 years old, while the 
architectural design principles employed are sound, parts of the api are 
showing their age.

River is tied to Java and is currently deployed in server back end, 
private networks.  There may be some hope in IoT, however at present we 
don't support Android and have limited scope outside of Java.  River is 
also tied to Java serialization, which has fallen out of favour for 
newer protocols in recent times.

Although some steps have been made toward modularising River, the 
monolothic build is hampering development efforts:
Modules allow a development campaign to focus on one module, allowing 
earlier completion, followed by review and release of an updated 
module.  The large monolothic codebase, prolongs a campain, (eg fixing 
race conditions) and makes it difficult for other developers to keep up 
with changes, resulting in generation of our own FUD and makes it 
difficult to release often.

On the plus side our suite of tests are quite comprehensive.

Regards,

Peter.