A BCEL future? Was: [POLL] Committer attendence

> Niclas Hedhman wrote:
> > Hi,
> > How many committers subscribe to this list?
> > 
> > [ ] I am a committer.
> > [ ] I am not a committer.

I'm on all Jakarta dev lists :)

Quick bit of cvs analysis.

BCEL has 6 committers at the moment. 3 are on the Jakarta PMC, but
Markus Dahm and Enver Haase seem to be the main committers by a long
way and are not; Markus has committed a couple of fixes last month,
but that's it for 2004. Last website deploy was in 2003.

372 java files, depends on jakarta-regexp, though only for one class.
Otherwise it's nicely stand-alone. My vague understanding of BCEL is
that ObjectWeb's ASM is in more use nowadays, but vague is the correct
term for me there :)

To contradict Niclas, all Jakarta committers don't have access to all
of Jakarta. It's delineated on sub-project basis, with only
Commons-sandbox as far as I know being open (and even there you have
to request access).

36 bugs in bugzilla since March 2003, so definitely work to be done,
with Cocoon being a user.

Some ideas:

* Wait for Markus and Enver to wake up, and see how we can help them.
* Someone find time to apply patches and consider bugs. Always hard to
do and yet still maintain a good sense of where the codebase is I
think. But at least it lets the community keep things moving.
* Move into Commons. I think it's probably too big, but I feel the
Commons community is good at such things and the scope of BCEL doesn't
seem that huge I might be underestimating it).
* Move to another Apache/Jakarta project. Seems unnecessary unless it
turns out that only Cocoon, say, uses BCEL.

I think no one will argue that if there are contributors with patches
waiting to be applied, we need committers to apply patches, to be
holders of the apache way and to guide contributors into committing
etc, the only question seems (to me) to be who those committers will
be.

Ideas?