2019 Q4 Hyperledger Fabric

Owned by Christopher Ferris
Last updated: Nov 08, 2019 by Gari Singh

Hyperledger Fabric

Project Health

Fabric continues to grow and mature. Our v1.4.3 release was delivered on Aug 26. We have experienced a slight decrease in the diversity of contributors with IBM comprising 43.0% of the contributors over the past quarter (+3.4%). We are still actively interested in growing contributions and expect the transition from Gerrit to GitHub will lower the barrier for contributions.

Issues

As noted, while the diversity of contributions and contributors is decreasing, we need to do better. We have updated the contribution process/policy to a GitHub specific flow for those repos we have already transferred. Hopefully, as we work through some of the CI/CD issues vis-a-vis releases, we will finish the migration. We hope that can be sometime in Q4.

Releases

As noted, we released v1.4.3 with no major new features, but some bug fixes and with some deprecated features such as Solo orderer and CAR chaincode format. We plan a 1.4.4 and 2.0 release later this quarter.

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

There are a good mix of questions in chat, email and on Stackoverflow – now over 4.3k questions (an increase of over 300 since June) 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, with one of them being implemented for v2.0. Additionally, there's ongoing work on a new command-line interface and more.

v2.0 is firming up with a new chaincode lifecycle available, and new options for chaincode build/launch available. Additionally a large amount of tech debt has been completed in the areas of automated test, CI, and code cleanup.

Current Plans

We expect to deliver our next set of fixes in v1.4.4 in November, and expect to deliver v2.0 by end of year.

Maintainer Diversity

No changes in maintainers, as always we would like to expand the diversity of maintainers.

Contributor Diversity

We have experienced a slight decrease in the diversity of contributors with IBM comprising 43.0% of the contributors over the past quarter (+3.4%). We are still actively interested in growing contributions and expect the transition from Gerrit to GitHub will lower the barrier for contributions.

Additional Information

We are still working through some aspects of how the new CI/CD process will work for Fabric, and so we have temporarily halted the transition from Gerrit beyond the 2 repos we previously moved as guinea pigs. We hope to have the full migration complete by EOY.

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