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 decreaase 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, but the current circumstances of moving from Gerrit to GitHub may temporarily be a disincentive because we aren't accepting new CR/PRs in the main fabric repo.

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. Additionally, there's ongoing work on a new command-line interface and more.

Current Plans

We are looking next at the 1.4.4 and 2.0 release, and over the next couple of months we hope to firm up plans for exactly when (and what) we deliver 2.0. 1.4.4 should be around early November.

Maintainer Diversity

no changes in 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%), though we are still looking to increase diversity of the maintainers.

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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