Re: Exist DB Community Changes

Dear all,

For our institution this all strengthens the feeling we need to reconsider the use of exist-db, we already felt that need because of performance, old java versions and libs, long standing issues, one highly complex monolithic solution for both database and app development, no jakarta ee compatible war, no atomic transactions, poor support for multiuser editing, etc.

I value Xml and exist-db a lot, don't get me wrong, but our institution needs to make future proof choices, and I wonder whether sticking with exist-db is a good choice in that respect.

Regards,
Eduard




Eduard Drenth, Software Architekt


[email protected]


Doelestrjitte 8

8911 DX  Ljouwert

(058) 213 14 14

+31 62 094 34 28

https://www.fryske-akademy.nl/
https://frysker.nl/
https://frisian.eu/
[cid:8bc42473-0b2f-46ae-9cf4-53515937ae62]

gpg: https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/pks/lookup?search=eduard+drenth&fingerprint=on&op=index

________________________________
From: Adam Retter <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, November 4, 2024 11:57 PM
To: Craig Berry <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Exist-open] Exist DB Community Changes

Thanks for the email Craig. Whilst I am deeply surprised and upset about what has happened, I am also sorry that it is effecting the eXist-db users such as yourself that I have worked so hard for and care about.

I appreciate you crunching and highlighting the numbers. For those who appreciate stats, a couple more for you:

1. As you say commits aren't everything. I also produced the last 22 consecutive releases of eXist-db.
Since 2017, of the 52 releases, I produced 75% of them. I did this unpaid.
My company Evolved Binary also at its own expense maintains a lot of the technical infrastructure that is required to produce and publish releases of eXist-db.
See - https://github.com/eXist-db/exist/releases

2. From your list of contributors. 8 of the other named people contributing to eXist-db were directed by me and paid for solely by my company Evolved Binary. There is also 1 more who was partially funded by my company. Removing me from the eXist-db project will also remove those other contributors too.

3. I undertook a 1 year solo project from 2017 to 2018 to fix locking and data corruption issues. It's not perfect still, but it was much improved.
That code base is was what became eXist-db 5.
https://evolvedbinary.com/technical-reports/exist-db/locking-and-cache-improvements/locking-and-cache-improvements-20180205.pdf
https://evolvedbinary.com/technical-reports/exist-db/asymmetrical-locking/asymmetrical-locking-20180205.pdf

4. I migrated eXist-db through 3 major versions of Java. To Java 6, then Java 8, and then again later to Java 17. I did this unpaid.

5. I migrated eXist-db's code base from SourceForge (and Subversion) to GitHub (and Git), which is why we have a comprehensive and intact source history and can still see who has done what and when. I did this unpaid. Speaking of which, you can also download CSV files from the graphs of contributors on GitHub going back to 2003 here - https://github.com/eXist-db/exist/graphs/contributors. GitHub's own graphs are quite revealing!
Out of sheer personal curiosity, I crunched some data myself. Considering only the top four contributors (as I didn't have time to crunch all the data available), I produced a little graph from the CSV data (attached). One could perhaps make the argument hat I have been the core contributor and maintainer of eXist-db since about 2015.

Regards the future of eXist-db, I have some plans. Feel free to reach out to me - [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>.


[Screenshot 2024-11-04 at 23.48.08.png]

On Mon, 4 Nov 2024 at 09:59, Craig Berry via Exist-open <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
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]<mailto:[email protected]>
1       Alberto Simões
1       Steven


> On Nov 2, 2024, at 6:11 AM, Adam Retter <[email protected]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[email protected]>
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/exist-open
>
>
> --
> Adam Retter
>
> eXist Core Developer
> { United Kingdom }
> [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
> _______________________________________________
> Exist-open mailing list
> [email protected]<mailto:[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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--
Adam Retter

eXist Core Developer
{ United Kingdom }
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>

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