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Clarify this project's development and maintenance status #15844
Description
Hi all! Reposting googleapis/python-ndb#765 (comment) here as a new issue. Hope you all don't mind.
Some work on ndb is clearly happening, primarily by @rwhogg. Great, thank you! We really do appreciate it.
It's not a lot, though. Details below.
I don't mean to be ungrateful. ndb is awesome, many of us have obviously used and benefited it for decades (!) now. Thank you! However, for those of us still actively building and maintaining our own projects on ndb, it's important for us to understand the maintainers' (ie Google's) level of ongoing commitment and investment here.
Will this project eventually be sunsetted? Will it continue on with minimal support? Or is there a path toward you all engaging more actively here? Any answer is ok! But if we want a datastore client library that's more actively maintained, do we need to start planning to eventually migrate to the official datastore client, or another library?
Thanks in advance.
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Looking at recent PRs, the vast majority are administrative or chores: docs, tests, dependencies, other minor refactorings and cleanups. Which are good! But of the ~100 PRs over the last year, it looks like just five are actual bug fixes or otherwise noticeable code changes: googleapis/python-ndb#882, googleapis/python-ndb#877, googleapis/python-ndb#873, googleapis/python-ndb#852, googleapis/python-ndb#815.
That may be OK. Development on a mature, actively maintained project can be slow, and still reasonable. But looking at the ~25 issues filed over the last year, many of which are real bugs or problems, it looks like only five received any response at all from maintainers - googleapis/python-ndb#911, googleapis/python-ndb#897, googleapis/python-ndb#862, googleapis/python-ndb#836, googleapis/python-ndb#804 - and three of those were filed by maintainers themselves.
Previously: googleapis/python-ndb#816, googleapis/python-ndb#765 etc
Activity
pnico commentedon Jan 4, 2024
Does use of this library essentially rule out use of async clients from the other python cloud client libraries?
googleapis/python-ndb#289 was closed as wont-fix citing backwards compatibility concerns, but I wonder if this is outweighed by the possibility that using it could create its own kind of legacy lock-in situation.
snarfed commentedon Sep 9, 2024
It's been a year since this was filed. Status seems roughly the same: no explanation of maintenance status, no response to any of the other questions here. Some active development! Notably a couple substantial bug fixes. No responses to new issues apart from those two bugs.
App Engine, the datastore, and ndb are all near and dear to my heart. I've used them for up to 18 years now. (No joke.) If I'm being obnoxious here, I'm doing it out of love, and because I want to responsibly maintain the projects I build and run on the datastore.
I really, really hope I can continue to rely on ndb like I have for so long! I really, really hope I don't need to go to the massive effort of migrating all of my projects and services to the datastore client. I'd like to hear something - anything! - from the ndb maintainers and Google about the status of this (GA!) project that's part of a service I pay a nontrivial amount for every month.
snarfed commentedon Oct 8, 2025
Another year, nothing has really changed. One meaningful commit, a couple minor dependency bumps, no engagement here on the issue tracker. No statement on maintenance status.
Google may not have said so out loud, but I can't interpret this any other way than ndb is effectively abandoned. I'm very disappointed that I'll eventually have to migrate elsewhere. 😕 😢
snarfed commentedon Oct 16, 2025
(^ I'd be totally fine with all of this if someone at Google would just say so! This project is minimally maintained, basic functionality and security patches only, not actively triaged or developed otherwise. Some kind of statement like that would do wonders for preserving trust here.)
chalmerlowe commentedon Mar 2, 2026
This issue was moved from the following repo as part of the monorepo migration: googleapis/python-ndb
daniel-sanche commentedon Jun 18, 2026
Hey @snarfed, we have no plans to sunset the library, but it is not likely to get active development attention in the near future, apart from bug fixes and maintenance releases. The datastore client is more frequently updated if you need something to migrate to.
snarfed commentedon Jun 19, 2026
@daniel-sanche hi! Thanks for confirming. Totally ok, I get it. Can I suggest that you add that message to https://github.com/googleapis/google-cloud-python/blob/main/packages/google-cloud-ndb/README.md ?