I'd just like to briefly follow up on a blog post I wrote last September, Looking For Stability In Heritrix Releases.
The short version is that the response I got was, in my opinion, insufficient to proceed. I'm open to revisiting the idea if that changes, but for now it is on ice.
There is little doubt in my mind that having (somewhat) regular stable releases made of Heritrix would be of notable benefit. Even better if they are published to Maven Central.
Instead, I'll continue to make my own forks from time to time and make sure they are stable for me. The last one was dubbed LBS-2015-01. It is now over a year old and a lot has changed. I expect I'll be making a new one in May/June. You can see what's changed in Heritrix in the meantime here.
I know a few organizations are also using my semi-stable releases. If you are one of them and would like to get some changes in before the next version (to be dubbed LBS-2016-02), you should try to get a PR into Heritrix before the end of April. Likewise, if you know of a serious/blocking bug in the current master of Heritrix, please bring it to my attention.
Hope we can chat next week at the assembly in Iceland. Library and Archives Canada is more and more thinking of using Archive-IT rather than maintain Heritrix in part due to the lack of an active community around Heritrix. We may be able to help out a bit if IIPC decides to make a push to support an Open Heritrix version.
ReplyDeleteI'm happy to chat next week as well at the assembly. I think a regular release a great idea. I have experience with this in the Islandora community (served as release manager for two years; PHP), and the Fedora community (served as release manager twice; Java). I'm happy to help out where I can.
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