Project Health
Maintainer Diversity
The current list of maintainers is made of 8 people from Bitwise IO (some formerly) and Intel. The maintainers have decreased over the last year as many have moved on to other positions and projects. We expect that number to continue to decrease.
[Current Maintainers] (https://github.com/hyperledger/sawtooth-core/blob/main/MAINTAINERS.md)
Project Adoption
The project has not maintained a list of adopters.
Goals
Performance Against Prior Goals
The previous years goals had focused primarily on trying to increase contributors to a level where a few contributors could become maintainers. While there was an increase in the variety of contributors, especially earlier in 2023, none of the contributors successfully transitioned to maintainers (due to eventual inactivity). Feature-related goals included a returned focus to Sawtooth 1.3 (unreleased branch) by backporting fixes from the current main branch and reworking the current build system to make use of Github Actions instead of Jenkins.
While minor progress was made on all goals, interest and work in these areas mostly stalled the second half of 2023.
Next Year’s Goals
Please see Project Lifecycle Stage Recommendation
Help Required
Please see Project Lifecycle Stage Recommendation
Project Lifecycle Stage Recommendation
For reference, the recently revised TOC Project Lifecycle document is at: https://toc.hyperledger.org/governing-documents/project-lifecycle.html
Hyperledger Sawtooth is currently in the Graduated state. The definition for Graduated includes the statement that “The TOC may decide to move a Graduated project that no longer meets the “Incubation Exit Criteria” back to Incubation state”. The intent is presumably a desire for Graduated projects to continually meet the Incubation Exit Criteria. While 2023 contributions were diverse, the criteria “must have an active and diverse set of contributing members” is likely not met due to long periods of project inactivity. Of the criteria listed in Incubation Exit Criteria, this is the only gap.
If the Graduated state is deemed inappropriate, there is not a suitable replacement state. Moving the project back to Incubation would presume an attempt to grow the project back to Graduated later; however, in 2023, we found no real desire from contributors to advance the project forward–only infrequent maintenance-level activities. Moving the project to Dormant may make sense except that Dormant has a time horizon of 6 months, and is thus not appropriate for long-term maintenance releases. Moving the project to Archived would make maintenance releases impossible because the git repositories are made read-only in that state.
Thus, we propose that the TOC move the project to Archived, with ongoing maintenance releases handled in a community outside of Hyperledger. We feel this would be best done within the context of the Splinter community, which is also maintaining versions of former Hyperledger projects Transact and Grid. Pull requests have been submitted to the various Sawtooth git repositories’s README.md files which reflect this transition should the proposal be accepted by the TOC.