DRAFT - September 2013 S4 ASF board report

S4 is a general-purpose, distributed, scalable, fault-tolerant, pluggable platform that allows programmers to easily develop applications for processing continuous unbounded streams of data.

S4 has been incubating since 2011-09-26.

Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:
 1. The frequency of releases has been low in the past. Working to put out more releases.
 2. The community rise, to be more active and flourish.

Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be aware of?
There also was discussion related to “retirement”. Currently people of the community stepped up and decided continue the project. As result, came up with building community, providing more patches, implementing new features. Moreover, Kurtt Lin wrote:
“Cheer up, guys. I'm seeing opportunities in this stream processing field as well as in S4. What I haven’t mentioned is that, S4 had found successful applications in our research group even back in the 0.3.0 days and now in our start-up. We have built scalable real time search over microblogs with some S4 features enhanced (the paper appears in 2013’s EDBT proceedings, link is http://www.edbt.org/Proceedings/2013-Genova/papers/edbt/a31-lin.pdf); we also built a platform on top of S4 for detecting and analyzing real-time traffic conditions, processing over hundreds of millions of records every day. Now we plan to contribute to the community. I personally have created and responded to some JIRAs, but I would like to do more. Actually, I am ongoing proposing a design documentation of integrating S4 with Helix along the roadmap; this would help enhancing the elasticity feature for S4. So, I suppose we could put the "retirement" discussion aside? Give us the new comers some time perhaps a couple of months to see what we can do to make the community healthier. Of course, some of us are new; we shall ask for your help and guidance occasionally, please be responsive (as what you are doing now), :) You all have done brilliant jobs! :) “

One particular problem we have been having is with growth of the community. Having said that in a recent e-mail thread, we have received very positive feedback from some developers, so we would like to remain in incubation for a little longer so that we can get some traction.

When were the last committers or PMC members elected?
Was reported by March 2013 (Daniel Gómez Ferro).

When did the project last make any releases?
June 2013: S4 0.6.0 released.
Two patches are available now, due to 0.7 release 3 of 18 issues was solved, the rest in progress.

How has the community developed since the last report?
In March, the dev mailing list was reasonably busy (132 messages) and then that's dwindled to less than 35 per month since March. There was no activity in git on August at all. A little in July, more in June. There has been no change in the community. We have been seeing some traffic on the mailing lists, mostly questions about how to use S4, but the code contributions have been fairly minimal. However, some developers have expressed interested in contributing so we expect to start receiving more contributions in the near future. To grow the community, we plan to have a closer interaction with other Apache projects like Gora and Helix.

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