2024 Q2 Hyperledger Fabric
Project Health
Hyperledger Fabric is fairly mature and stable with a v2.5 Long-term support (LTS) release. There is less churn and fewer commits than in years past, with continued focus on quality and support. New features get proposed, approved, and implemented based on a community RFC process. Mailing list activity is down a bit compared to prior years. PRs and mailing list questions are generally turned around quickly. There is significant Discord activity.
Questions/Issues for the TOC
None.
Releases
LTS release:
- v2.5 is the current LTS release with patch releases at least quarterly.
- Note that v2.2 has reached end of maintenance and all users are encouraged to update to v2.5 to continue receiving fixes and security updates.
Releases past quarter:
- Fabric v2.2.15 - February 19, 2024 (last v2.2.x release)
- Fabric v2.5.6 - February 19, 2024
- Fabric v2.5.7 - April 15, 2024
- Fabric v3.0.0-beta - March 14, 2024
Overall Activity in the Past Quarter
The project delivered fixes to the Fabric v2.2 and v2.5 releases. See release notes for details.
The SmartBFT consensus algorithm integration into the Fabric ordering service was completed and delivered in the v3.0.0-beta release in March. The SmartBFT consensus algorithm itself was moved into hyperledger-labs.
Also included in the v3.0.0-beta release is a new feature to query all approved chaincodes on a channel.
The last remnants of Azure Pipelines were removed, the transition to Github Actions is now 100% complete, and there was much rejoicing.
Current Plans
The project continues to maintain and keep Fabric v2.5 current.
The project is working through final items required for a v3.0 release:
- Completion of SmartBFT tests
- Removal of features that were deprecated long ago, e.g. v1 lifecycle, specifying orderer endpoints at global level, configtxgen –outputAnchorPeersUpdate flag, fabric-tools image
- Channel config updates
Maintainer Diversity
7 of 9 maintainers from IBM. A maintainer from Hitachi was added this quarter.
Contributor Diversity
- 53% of code activities were performed by top 7 contributors. Remaining 47% performed by 180 other contributors.
- IBM contributors accounted for 81% of activity.
- Of top 10 contributors, 6 of 10 from IBM.
In summary, the project remains top-heavy from IBM but has good depth of smaller contributors.