Last week I was at OSDC in Sydney. It was my first time there, and I thoroughly enjoyed meeting a new segment of the Australian tech. crowd.
I gave a talk on the Apache Software Foundation, and particularly how the Incubator functions (based on a similar talk from ApacheCon NA 2011). The slides are up on Slideshare now:
Tagged Apache, Community, conferences, incubator, osdc, presentations
Just short of two years ago, NPanday was established at Codeplex. It picked up where one of the branches of the NMaven podling had left off, and has since grown into the most stable, popular and comprehensive solution for Maven users looking to build .NET projects.
I wrote more about what NPanday does in the previous post on its 1.2 release, and there is plenty of information in the incubation proposal if this is an area you are interested in.
There were several reasons in my mind for returning to Apache.
The most pressing reason was repeated problems with infrastructure at Codeplex, and in particular the SVN interface they provide over the top of TFS. Failures with creating tags, altering properties, and general timeouts and weird errors were holding up releases and development (extracting the history from this was also an “interesting” exercise, and the subject of a future post).
Apache provides not only the infrastructure but the governance structure to best support and “future proof” a growing community. We had recently added two committers in Lars and Craig, and have been seeing regular patches from other contributors. The Codeplex stats showed that we had thousands of downloads and visitors, not including traffic directly to the Maven repository. This growing community has given me confidence that the project will move quickly towards a successful graduation.
Moving isn’t a quick process (now at two months since the original proposal), and thanks go to our users for bearing with us. We’re still in the process of moving infrastructure, with the following set up:
We’re still working on migrating the web site and issue tracker.
Back to the code, there’s plenty of work to do, and discussions on the next features and changes have started on the new list. If you’re interested in a Maven-like solution for building .NET projects, or working in a hybrid Java-.NET environment, we’d like to hear from you! We’re particularly interested in working with folks that can help improve the C# portions of the code, including the Visual Studio Add-in.
If you’re one of the many users out there, what do you think of the move?
Apache Maven 2: Effective Implementation
Brett Porter, Maria Odea Ching
Coverage of intermediate Apache Maven concepts with a focus on best practices and "tying it all together". Significant coverage of automated build and repository management concepts, illustrated using Apache Continuum and Apache Archiva.
Brett Porter 