State of cucumber-jvm

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MP Korstanje

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May 13, 2017, 5:48:56 AM5/13/17
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Hey folks,

looking at the state of cucumber-jvm I'm somewhat worried. There has been no meaningful activity since September last year. From cucumber/cucumber-jvm#1035 I gather that Aslak Hellesøy is the only one who can accept PRs and build releases but he has not done so for a while. He appears to be active on Twitter and somewhat on Github but not in cucumber-jvm.

Does anybody know what the hold up is?

I'm working on improving the integration between maven-surefire, cucumber-jvm, and cucumber-jvm-parallel plugin a bit. To this end I'd like to see /cucumber/cucumber-jvm#1121 merged and released. Personally I'd rather see it released sooner then later so I can be done with it in a timely fashion.

Best,
Rien

Björn Rasmusson

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May 13, 2017, 8:41:20 AM5/13/17
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Hi,


It is true that Aslak Hellesøy is the only one who can build releases of Cucumber-JVM.


I can (and I have) merge PR:s, but I not very keen on merging a major change like cucumber/cucumber-jvm#1035 with no review at all (and since I made the change, I cannot review it).


Disclamer: the following is my own personal opinions, not an official position of the Cucumber Open Source projects or the Cucumber-JVM Open Source project.


Aslak Hellesøy is very busy, including with work within the Cucumber Open Source project even though lately not so much with Cucumber-JVM.


Because of that, I believe that doing another release in the Cucumber-JVM v1.x-track is not the way to go. It would just result in delaying the release of Cucumber-JVM v2.0.0 (which includes upgrading from Gherkin 2.12.2, which for instance Cucumber-Ruby did two years ago), and create unnecessary rework when the changes after Cucumber-JVM v1.2.5 have to be reimplemented on top of cucumber/cucumber-jvm#1035.


I would like the events to unfold like this:

* merge cucumber/cucumber-jvm#1035, which creates the snapshot release Cucumber-JVM v2.0.0-SNAPSHOT (I can merge it, but again merging a major change with not review what so ever makes me uncomfortable)

* merge a small set of other PR:s

* release Cucumber-JVM v2.0.0


The last step requires Aslak Hellesøy involvement, for the other ones his involvement is not mandatory, but is very welcome. I would however want him to agree on this plan, before it is executed.


Cheers,

Björn


 
Best,
Rien

Aslak Hellesøy

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May 13, 2017, 9:50:25 AM5/13/17
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On Saturday, May 13, 2017 at 10:48:56 AM UTC+1, MP Korstanje wrote:
Hey folks,


Hi!
 
looking at the state of cucumber-jvm I'm somewhat worried. There has been no meaningful activity since September last year. From cucumber/cucumber-jvm#1035 I gather that Aslak Hellesøy is the only one who can accept PRs and build releases but he has not done so for a while. He appears to be active on Twitter and somewhat on Github but not in cucumber-jvm.


Thanks for noticing!
 
Does anybody know what the hold up is?


I used to work on Cucumber in my spare time. I don't have spare time anymore, so that's one hold-up.
The other hold-up is lack of funding to be able to work on it during work hours.

3-4 years ago I co-founded Cucumber Ltd to do just that - fund open source work from other revenue-generating activities:

Our company is becoming financially stronger every year, but we haven't yet reached a point where we can justify spending significant time working on open source. Open source development doesn't generate revenue. Well, it kind of does, indirectly by generating more demand for commercial services, but that loop is too long.

Björn Rasmusson and others have been contributing great pull requests which I am grateful for, and I feel bad for being a bottleneck. I'm sure Björn would have done a tremendous job if I handed over the stewardship of Cucumber-JVM to him, but he's also got a day job. And because Cucumber is our company's most important asset, I kind of have to stay in control over it.

What the Cucumber open source project needs is proper funding. There is an estimated 1M or so corporate users of it around the world, I'm sure half of fortune 500 companies use it. 

It should be possible to raise enough money from our community that we can pay a few developers to work full time on Cucumber, and by that I mean Cucumber-Ruby, Cucumber.js, Cucumber-JVM, Gherkin, Cucumber-Expressions, Tag Expressions, Cucumber Event Protocol, Cucumber GUI, Cucumber Parallel, and DOCUMENTATION.

It would be ideal to have a mix of paid developers from Cucumber Ltd and other companies and/or independents. The ideal situation would be me funded to work 2 days a week and one or two others to work full time. Cucumber Ltd can foot some of the bill, but we're a small company and we'd need considerable help to make this happen.

In the next few weeks I'll make it a priority to put together a crowd funding campaign. I'm more interested in recurring funding rather than a one-off chunk of money. Cucumber, like any project needs continuous attention. We'd be 100% transparent about how the money is spent.

This will be the first time I'm running a crowdfunding campaign, so I'll take all the advice I can get, about what to put in the campaign, where to run it etc.

I'm excited about this!

Aslak

MP Korstanje

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May 13, 2017, 12:20:04 PM5/13/17
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Bjorn this is understandable and I agree with your vision of the ideal order of events. While I probably lack the expertise to review your whole PR, I feel that I've come to understand a significant part of cucumber-jvm. So I can offer to review a significant part of your PR.

I'll also ask @teymyers and @damianszczepanik and see if they want to help.
 
 
Best,
Rien

MP Korstanje

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May 13, 2017, 12:44:53 PM5/13/17
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Asiak,

I now understand your predicament. Thanks for taking the time to explain it.

Unfortunately I'm doing this to scratch my own itches independently. But I will point out the fact that open source software needs proper funding to work to my employers. They are unfortunately not fortune 500 companies but I'll definitely mention your plight.

Definitely looking forward to the campaign!


Mark Levison

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May 14, 2017, 2:39:34 PM5/14/17
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Aslak - you might ping the JUnit 5 gang to see what worked well for them. Like others I'm entirely an independent, in my case Cucumber isn't even part of my personal work (Consulting, Executive Coaching and Scrum Training), yet I will happily sponsor some work on the tool so that it exists for all of my clients.

Cheers
Mark



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