Project

Hyperledger Fabric

Project Health

Fabric continues to grow and mature. Our v1.4.2 release was delivered on July 22nd. We have experienced a slight increase in the diversity of contributors with IBM comprising 39.6% of the contributors over the past quarter (-3.4%), though we are still looking to increase diversity of the maintainers.

Issues

As noted, while the diversity of contributions and contributors is increasing, we need to do better. We know that we need to be more responsive to CRs coming from new contributors and the maintainers are looking to make this a priority. We are also seeking to grow diversity of maintainer-ship, however, this is an earned designation that comes from having non-maintainers performing sustained and constructive code reviews (augmenting the maintainers, and often serving as a triage).

Releases

As noted, we released v1.4.2 last week with the major new feature being the migration from Kafka to Raft consensus. We are hoping that operators will take advantage of the new migration capability to move off of the more complex Kafka deployments.

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

There are a good mix of questions in chat, email and on Stackoverflow – now over 4k questions (an increase of over 400 since April) for the 'hyperledger-fabric' tag, with the majority being answered. The questions themselves continue to be increasingly sophisticated, which is also a good sign.

There has also been a good deal of new major contributions being proposed and started. Fabric performance (which for a DLT is actually pretty decent) is receiving lots of interest with various proposals for optimizations that can yield significant performance improvements. Additionally, there's ongoing work on a new command-line interface and more.

Current Plans

We are looking next at the 2.0 release, and over the next couple of weeks we hope to firm up plans for exactly when (and what) we deliver 2.0.

Maintainer Diversity

Added Jay Guo, IBM for his contributions to the Raft consensus and demonstrated consistent constructive reviews over a sustained period.

Contributor Diversity

We have experienced a slight increase in the diversity of contributors with IBM comprising 39.6% of the contributors over the past quarter (-3.4%), though we are still looking to increase diversity of the maintainers. Number of organizations represented increased by 2.

Additional Information

The CI/CD proposal from the CI/CD committee was reviewed in this week's bi-weekly Fabric Contributors meeting and there was general consensus that CircleCI would be adequate for our needs (though someone did raise the issue of successive patches that Gerrit handles well, but for which GitHub requires a manual hack). The maintainers plan a vote on adoption of the proposed CircleCI approach that was prototyped for the fabric repository.

Reviewed by

• Arnaud Le Hors
• Baohua Yang
• Binh Nguyen
• Christopher Ferris
• Dan Middleton
• Hart Montgomery
• Kelly Olson
• Mark Wagner
• Mic Bowman
• Nathan George
• Silas Davis