Togglz is looking for a new maintainer

[Christian Kaltepoth]

Hi all,

I started my work on Togglz in later 2011, right after returning from my first IT conference WJAX 2011 in Munich. I visited a talk about continuous delivery (I don't remember the speaker's name anymore) and learned about the feature toggles pattern. I was very impressed by the underlying idea and immediately searched for feature toggle libraries for Java. To my surprise, there were no really good libraries out there. So I created my own library, which became one of the most popular feature toggle libraries for the Java platform.

Today, 7 years later, Togglz is incredibly popular. The Togglz core module was downloaded about 29k times from Maven Central last month. For me, that's quite impressive. I never expected Togglz to become so popular. But that's all because of the great community that formed around the project. We got so many great contributions, especially in form of integration modules with other popular Java libraries and frameworks. I created Togglz with extensibility in mind, and I think that this was the most important success factor. People were able to integrate Togglz with any technology very easily.

Unfortunately I don't find much time to work on Togglz anymore. I don't use it very often in my own projects and when I use it, it has all the features I need. Today I spend most of my time working on JCP/Jakarta EE projects which consumes a lot of my spare time. I tried many strategies to create a sustainable way to keep Togglz alive in the last years. First it was a simple donate button, then I created an OpenCollective group, but actually I was the only one donating money to the collective, which was frustrating. Working on OSS is really hard. Everyone expects that you are doing all the work. Of course there are a few exceptions, especially people contributing bugfixes and new features, but these cases are very rare. I'm feeling guilty. There are many users who actually use Togglz and depend on maintenance of the project. And there are a few people who actually want to help the project. But I even don't find the time to review their code and give feedback anymore. My spare time is limited and my family has higher priority.

Therefore, I'm stepping down from my role as the Togglz project lead and from being an active committer.

I guess most of you are now asking "What will happen with Togglz? Is the project doomed?". Well, this depends on you. In the best case, one of the current committers is willing to become the new lead and take on responsibility of reviewing pull request, decide over the technical direction and doing the releases. I would love to see this happening. If nobody steps up, Togglz will be unmaintained in near future. Of course this would be very disappointing for everyone, so I'm hoping that this won't happen.

Christian

--

Christian Kaltepoth

Blog: http://blog.kaltepoth.de/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/chkal

GitHub: https://github.com/chkal

[Christian Kaltepoth]

Hi Richard,

sure, of course I remember you. Your contributions were very helpful. Thanks a lot for them.

I would be really happy to see a company allocating resources to work on Togglz. That would be awesome and a fantastic way to ensure sustainability for the project.

You actually already have commit permissions for the repository. So currently you could already do most of the things I was doing in the past, which is: Responding to issues, reviewing pull request and helping others who are running into problems. All these things could be done by any of the committers. There is only one thing that only I can do at the moment, which is doing the releases. However, I would be fine with doing the release for the next version and take the opportunity to document the procedure accordingly. After that, somebody else could take over that role. We would need to request the corresponding permissions from the Sonatype guys, but that should be easy. Giving permissions to do releases to somebody is a huge step, especially in the light of the recent NPM incident, but I'm confident that we can manage that.

There are already a few pending pull requests waiting for review, especially:

https://github.com/togglz/togglz/pull/307

https://github.com/togglz/togglz/pull/302

Especially the latter one requires more reviews, because it provides a feature which has been requested multiple times.

Regarding your question about the workload. Currently I think about 1 hour per weeks would enough. There are not so many new issues created and only a few new pull requests. However, I think it would reduce the overall workload per committer if there is more than one person doing the job. If there are more committers who are willing to review pull request, there could be some kind of convention about how many +1 votes are required for a pull request to get merged. That's how other popular open source projects work.

Christian

Am Mi., 28. Nov. 2018 um 19:46 Uhr schrieb Steele, Rich <ri...@steelezone.net>:

Hi Christian. I don't know if you remember me, but I provided some PRs, mainly for Archaius support and composite repositories a couple of years ago. You made me a committer after that, but then shortly afterward I moved into another role that takes most of my time where I don't get to code much anymore.

Based partly on those changes you accepted I was able to get Togglz accepted as a defacto standard for several high-profile projects at my company. Although it's disheartening to hear that you're stepping away, I can only imagine the angst it has caused; it's probably a lot like walking away from a child. Anyway, I wanted to let you know that I'm working within my company to see if we can allocate resources to take over as maintainer for Togglz. I'd do it myself, but honestly your situation sounds a lot like mine, with a lot of "number one" priorities taking too much of my time. I can't make any guarantees, but I've been pushing my company to be more active in the open source community; we take a lot from open source, it's only fair we give back. In my opinion, Togglz might be an ideal popular but not too large project to take on.

First, has anyone else stepped forward?

Second, I think it would be helpful if you could provide some information on what kind of workload it takes to maintain Togglz, ideally in hours per week, to review PRs, answer questions, etc.

And finally, thank you so much for providing this framework. As you said, it was a little surprising it wasn't available from somewhere else. I found your modular, decoupled design refreshing and even a joy to work with.

Take care,

Rich