Is The Project Still Actively Maintained ?

[mickdelaney]

Hi,

We're looking at potentially adopting and contributing to kafkaflow.

But I wanted to get an understanding of where the project is from a maintainence point of view.
It seems that activity has dropped off.
Are the core team still working on the project ?
Are there plans for new releases ?
Would it be possible to get involved ?

Regards

[Skyppid]

Same position. Considering replacing our selfmade solution with Kafkaflow as it's well established, more robust and powerful. But seeing that it runs on Kafka 2.1.1 while 2.8 is latest, the pain of changing all to that library which has open PRs and issues since mid 2024 without any change ... I guess reinventing the wheel for our needs remains the way to go unfortunately.

By the looks of it it's not just lack of community participation but also lack of active contributors who would review PRs and create releases and stuff?

[Skyppid]

Sounds good, for me it's just to evaluate if we can make use of it at all. Otherwise we'll develop our own tailored solution as KafkaFlow does a lot more than we even require.

Let's wait if you get some responses then.

[AlexeyRaga]

Yeah. I am looking towards MassTransit to evaluate... But it feels more complicated for simple Kafka consumers...

[brmagadutra]

Hi, as part of the Farfetch maintainers team, we want to clarify:

• Farfetch exists :) - www.farfetch.com
• We deeply appreciate the community engagement with this framework
• The framework is very important to Farfetch, since it is one most used internally, and is also extensively used externally
• We understand your concerns about the apparent lack of maintenance, that is something we already identified and are analyzing internally

We are discussing internally with our leadership the priority and the best course of action to allow the framework to evolve However, feel free to send your contribution; we are prioritizing it as best we can right now.

We will post here on this thread as soon as we have an update on this matter.

[Skyppid]

@brmagadutra Ah great to hear some official feedback :)

May I address two concerns we have that you might want to also talk about internally how to continue with that:

• the Confluence Kafka library used is quite outdated - I successfully updated it to latest without any breaking issues in the Integration Tests (might not cover everything, but at least the most common things I guess). This worries us when it comes to reliability and security concerns
• The support of modern .NET - the library is built on .NET Standard which is deprecated. I upgraded it to .NET 9 (and also upgraded all packages) with little breaking changes. Basically just the Serializers broke due to reflection usage (quick and easy fix). Also this enables support for System.Text.Json async APIs which currently are not supported.

As you say it's very much internally used, I guess simply upgrading it won't be in your interest. It would be nice if we could at least try to make it compatible (using directives and multiple target frameworks) for example. Also the performance improvements made since .NET 5 are very much to consider as it's an easy gain by simply switching to newer versions.

Thanks!

[AlexeyRaga]

@brmagadutra Great to see that!
As mentioned, the biggest issue is that dependencies are getting outdated.
Also important PRs like this one are not getting reviewed/merged is an issue.