2020 Q2 Hyperledger Fabric

Created by Christopher Ferris, last modified by Gari Singh on Apr 27, 2020

Project Health

Hyperledger Fabric continues to be quite active, and even saw a bit of a bump in contributions, likely because of renewed interest with the release of 2.0 and the migration to GitHub. The number of contributors this past quarter grew by 25, which is a good sign. The mailing list is roughly the same level of traffic as the past two quarters and up from a year ago. The RC traffic continues to be very heavy.

Questions/Issues for the TSC

none at this time

Releases

The Fabric maintainers published four releases this past quarter, including Hyperledger Fabric 2.0 , 2.0.1, 1.4.5, and 1.4.6 and they are preparing to release Hyperledger Fabric 2.1.

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

The early part of the quarter was dominated by preparations to publish the 2.0 release followed by 2 patch releases of our LTS 1.4 release branch. The maintainers have agreed on a LTS strategy with overlapping LTS releases, and will continue to support 1.4.x as an LTS release and will look to publish a new v2.x LTS release this summer. The support for 1.4.x will continue for six months after the release of our second LTS release.

Current Plans

The Fabric maintainers keep their planning for significant enhancements in an RFC repo. There are presently 5 new RFCs under consideration .

Maintainer Diversity

There were four new maintainers added. Three IBMers and one independent. We continue to actively look for new opportunity to add maintainers and invite interested engineers to start contributing and helping to review pull requests. One thing we did add recently is some clarification on what the criteria is for becoming a maintainer.

Contributor Diversity

The Fabric projects saw an uptick in participation in the first quarter of 2020 with the number of Unaffiliated developers jumping considerably, paired with some reduction in the number of IBMers such that IBM now comprises only 28.9% of the total number of contributors. The number of contributing organizations continues to be about the same (18 plus a large number of unaffiliated devs).

Additional Information

n/a

Reviewed by

• ✅ Angelo De Caro
• ✅ Arnaud J Le Hors
• ✅ Christopher Ferris
• ✅ Dan Middleton
• ✅ Gari Singh
• ✅ Hart Montgomery
• ✅ Mark Wagner
• ✅ Nathan George
• ✅ Swetha Repakula
• ✅ Tracy Kuhrt
• ✅ Troy Ronda

Comments:

I see documentation on Fabric 2.0 missing some of the elements from earlier releases. For example the 1.4 release had a mention of PeerLedger and it helped understand what's being done in a peer. But 2.0 release does not have a mention of this word. Do we need a mechanism to keep checks on documentation before release? I was surprised to not find a section equivalent to  https://hyperledger-fabric.readthedocs.io/en/release-1.4/arch-deep-dive.html#post-v1-validated-ledger-and-peerledger-checkpointing-pruning  in 2.0 release documentation. Then figured out that the Architecture Origins section itself is removed. Posted by arsulegai at Apr 15, 2020 14:38