Status report of APR Apache Portable Runtime project

["William A. Rowe, Jr." <wr...@rowe-clan.net>]

draft - for comment before I plug into board@ and send to the dev list
a bit later today.

Status report of APR Apache Portable Runtime project
----------------------------------------------------

Activity has been slow/steady since the previous board report.  For the
period March through May, we had some 75 commits to trunk (the future 1.3
or 2.0 version) by 11 active committers, many maintenance commits on the
legacy branches, and some 25 APR, 3 APR-iconv and 10 APR-util bugs were
resolved this period, with some 37 open bugs remaining.  There were no new
releases in that period.  (Three packages were tagged in June for release
votes - still ongoing.)

No significant interest/pressure has occurred to push to the next 1.3 or
2.0 release.  By APR versioning rules, 2.0 occurs once there is action
to fix broken ABI or naming convention issues which render the libraries
incompatible, and this isn't foreseen at this time.  It's very possible
that either httpd or another consuming project will be the driving factor
for development of, and for shipping the next version.  Prior to releasing
1.3 or 2.0, the md4/md5 code license issue raised by the BSD project is
the only apparent showstopper (RSA license grant).  The project welcomes
appropriate patches to resolve that.

Three committers were added, fuankg, davi and rpluem.  There were no new
PMC members added, and this is a yellow-flag that the project should now
be considering PMC nominations.  Garrett, as mentioned in March, did step
down from the Chair of the APR project, and the project members thank him
for his service and dedication as Chairman.

As an incoming project chair, I was able to take advantage of Sally's
Media Training in Amsterdam, and strongly encourage the board to convince
her to repeat this, and find the funding to make it happen, at future
ApacheCon events for our PRC members, project chairman, as well as other
ASF contributors as space permits.  I believe it's a win for our projects
to gain some of her insight into communicating with the technical press.

Bill