HBase Quarterly report Oct-Dec 2020

[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:

## Membership Data:
Apache HBase was founded 2010-04-21 (11 years ago)
There are currently 92 committers and 54 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 3:2.

Community changes, past quarter:
- No new PMC members. Last addition was Viraj Jasani on 2020-10-03.
- Yulin Niu was added as committer on 2020-12-03
- Xin Sun was added as committer on 2020-12-03

## Project Activity:
Recent releases:
2.4.0 was released on 2020-12-15.
hbase-thirdparty-3.4.1 was released on 2020-11-27.
2.3.3 was released on 2020-11-02.

A new minor release line 2.4.x has been established, which is the fifth
minor
release line for 2.x.

We discussed whether to purge the hbase-backup module because it has not
been
included in any releases and now lack maintenance and there was a user in
the community who wanted to maintain it.
https://s.apache.org/k5b9i

We discussed how to better make use of 'Signed-off-by' in the commit
message.
There is no consensus so far, mainly because whether to use 'Reviewed-by'
instead of 'Signed-off-by' for non committer reviewers.
https://s.apache.org/tgjup

We decided to move the stable pointer to 2.3.x and EOL the 2.2.x release
line.
The final release for 2.2.x will be 2.2.7.
https://s.apache.org/7rqow

We switched from OpenTracing to OpenTelemetry for implementing our tracing
system.
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-22120

## Community Health:
- Mailing list activity:
dev@hbase.apache.org:
985 subscribers(989 in the previous quarter)
1014 emails sent to list(1167 in the previous quarter)

user@hbase.apache.org:
2080 subscribers(2085 in the previous quarter)
85 emails sent to list(87 in the previous quarter)

user-zh@hbase.apache.org
71 subscribers(69 in the previous quarter)
35 emails sent to list(41 in the previous quarter)

- JIRA activity:
296 issues opened in JIRA, past quarter (-35% decrease)
226 issues closed in JIRA, past quarter (-46% decrease)

- Commit activity:
809 commits in the past quarter (-30% decrease)
73 code contributors in the past quarter (1% increase)

- GitHub PR activity:
337 PRs opened on GitHub, past quarter (-34% decrease)
313 PRs closed on GitHub, past quarter (-38% decrease)

We had a new minor release this quarter but still not too many new commits.
This means 2.x is getting more and more stable and no big new features for
2.x. This is a sign that we may need to kick the 3.0.0 release. A good news
is
that the number of contributors remained at the same level.