Re: Exist DB Community Changes

As someone who has had cordial and helpful interactions with both Adam and with some of the eXist Solutions folks for several years, this state of affairs really saddens me.  As someone who maintains a project that depends on eXist, it also really concerns me about the future of eXist.

I've had the somewhat vague impression that Adam has done the lion's share of the work to maintain eXist for quite some time, and I wanted to make that impression less vague, so I did some digging.  The git logs below show that in the current develop branch the number of non-merge commits in the last five years totals 3115, or 2261 after weeding out dependabot commits. That's followed by a list showing the number of non-merge commits per committer in descending order by commit count.

With 1266 commits, Adam produced 56% of all the human-produced commits in that period, 4.5 times as many as the next most-prolific human contributor. I realize commit counts are somewhat of a rough-and-ready placeholder for contribution and they surely overstate some things and understate others.  One of the things they understate is producing releases, and it seems like Adam has done most of those in recent years too.

I want to emphasize that I really appreciate the work of *all* the contributors, and I'm merely pointing out that the already somewhat anemic pace of eXist development appears to have taken a very serious blow given that its one really prolific contributor is being locked out. Is there a plan to address this?  Should folks be looking for an alternative to eXist?

% git describe
eXist-6.2.0-1595-ge8b4798931
% git log --no-merges --pretty=format:"%an" --since=2019-11-01 | wc -l
    3115
% git log --no-merges --pretty=format:"%an" --since=2019-11-01 \
| perl -ne 'chomp; $au{$_}++; END {for my $x (sort { $au{$b} <=> $au{$a} } keys %au ) {print qq/$au{$x}\t$x\n/}};'
1266	Adam Retter
638	dependabot[bot]
277	Dannes Wessels
253	Juri Leino
216	dependabot-preview[bot]
152	Alan Paxton
69	Patrick Reinhart
54	Christopher McGeorge
27	Joe Wicentowski
26	mamroure
19	marmoure
17	Radek Hubner
17	duncdrum
17	Gabriele Tomassetti
16	Wolfgang Meier
12	Adrian Hamm
10	Duncan Paterson
9	Lars Windauer
6	Stanislav Jordanov
5	Nico Verwer
1	Stefan Hynek
1	markhall82
1	lujie
1	Otmar Humbel
1	stephan makowski
1	naveen
1	hoijui
1	[email protected]
1	Alberto Simões
1	Steven


> On Nov 2, 2024, at 6:11 AM, Adam Retter <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 
> For those that are interested in hearing the truth, please feel free to contact me directly. Or if you wish you can read the public responses from myself, and other eXist-db users and XML experts in the #community channel of the eXist-db Slack Workspace - https://exist-db.slack.com/
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, 30 Oct 2024 at 16:31, Duncan Paterson <[email protected]> wrote:
> In an abstract for his presentation at the upcoming Declarative Amsterdam conference, Adam Retter announced his decision to fork eXist-db and launch a competing project. This action is commonplace in open source. However, in justifying his decision, Adam maligned the eXist community and project - in a strikingly unprofessional manner. 
> 
> On October 7 and 14, 2024 during the weekly Community Call, eXist-db’s core developers and active community members discussed this matter and unanimously concluded that we no longer have the necessary trust in Adam to speak or act in the best interests of the eXist community. We have therefore revoked his status as a core developer and his administrative privileges from the eXist-db GitHub organization and related community resources. We regret having to take these measures. But we believe that they are vital to restoring the collegial and welcoming atmosphere that marked the eXist-db community since its founding by Wolfgang Meier in 2001. We thank Adam for all of his work on eXist-db and wish him well with his new project.
> 
> 
> == Signatories == 
> 
> Dannes Wessels, 
> Duncan Paterson,
> Joseph Wicentowski,
> Joern Turner,
> Juri Leino, 
> Lars Windauer,
> Magdalena Turska,
> Olaf Schreck,
> Patrick Reinhart,
> Wolfgang Meier, (founder eXist-db)
> _______________________________________________
> Exist-open mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/exist-open
> 
> 
> -- 
> Adam Retter
> 
> eXist Core Developer
> { United Kingdom }
> [email protected]
> _______________________________________________
> Exist-open mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/exist-open

________________________________________
Craig A. Berry

"... getting out of a sonnet is much more
 difficult than getting in."
                 Brad Leithauser



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